The Mime of Sleep

Clark Ashton Smith

My dreams are turned to some disordered mime:
A plot that pandemonian shadows feign
Ravels half told; and dead loves live again
In settings of distorted place and time:
A broken drama, puerile or sublime,
Whose riddled meaning I must guess in vain;
A masque, whose grey grotesques of mirth and pain
Move randomly through an occulted clime.

But though they pass, and slumber blot them all,
Your beauty's burning shade more slowly dims—
Where, dancing like Salome, you let fall,
In splendid sequence under a sad sky,
The seven veils of fantasy that I
Have wound about your young, delightful limbs.

Printed from: www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/575
Printed on: April 24, 2024