Dazzling, Sinister Word-Worlds

Clark Ashton Smith! Your name strikes adamant.
Yours are the color wheel’s most tenebrous hues.
Your lexicon, though, helps lighten graver views
Via dazzling words…note cinnabar in slants
Of fulgor that replenish mystic heavens
With gleams that yield to amethystine glow,
Fading to verdant lights, azures uneven,
Combating more scarlet farewells which we know
For sundown…yet these are noons upon your worlds
Whose shadowed carmine undersides of leaf,
Whose branches, must pale near alabraundine stems
And trunks that mutter malice to the furled
Black roots ground into slime-fouled dregs of grief
In draughts distilled as from molten anadems.

Grief to explorers whose bright-colored schemes
Mislead them where leechlike, suctioning darkness teems…!

TomGoff Wrote:
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> And trunks that mutter malice to the furled
> Black roots ground into slime-fouled dregs of grief
> In draughts distilled as from molten anadems.

An interesting tribute - the lines quoted above are quite elegantly malevolent. I don't doubt that CAS would have gotten at least a tinge of pleasure from such a twisted vision!

My thanks to you...an experiment at trying on
some of CAS's vocabulary. Have been newly enthused
over Darin Coelho Spring's "The Emperor of Dreams."

Thanks for sharing! I enjoyed the post!

[NOTE: For what it's worth, I first came across the freshly printed Ballentine "Zothique" in 1969, at the Mithras Bookstore, which fronted the Unicorn Theatre in La Jolla, while waiting for Godard's "Weekend" to start.

Things have not been the same since.]

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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