Said The Dreamer

My dreams were nests or horror,

whimsey-wrought

with orts and shreds

from old abysses brought

where eyries built by condor-winged awe

enskied on somber pinnacles of thought

Fantastical, I saw the visions shift

like bubbles that a titan's breath might lift

Drowning in seas more deep than his despair

iron-colored, soon to shatter or to drift.

Or like illuminated crystals

fallen from hands

of gods, that cloud interiorly with lands

of wider spheres exalted past the sun

or burst while thought

in idle question stands

Said the dreamer

Conscious of gulfs in which I dared not gaze

I passed on faltering and imperilled ways

through lands where hoary mountains

danced and roared

to baleful pygmeis piping hellish lays

the flames that wait

against the end of things

where light and limit to my wanderings

through deserts bleaching

like the bones of death

aback I fled, and faltered on spent wings

In night cimmerian, thronged with sorceries

where lightnings flamed

on empty sands and seas

or feared the leopard0crough of pallid shapes

in saracenic arches of black trees.

Then in the dream I dreamt that time was done

light still endured,

whose touch I might not shun

though at my back I heard the lips of night

puff out the flaring flambeau of the sun

Said the dreamer

I leaned from some black precipice,

to see the pits beneath,

one came, not far from me

to hurled therein the sockets of the stars

and shells of worlds that rattled emptily.