Narcissus

by Clark Ashton Smith


Splenetic, pale Narcissus, in the green dead depth of some rotting pool: thou
seest thine image drown and re-emmerge, beneath the shifting iridescence of
corruption, the beautiful bright scum that damascenes with fantastic arabesques
the fetid water. Or in the brazen mirrors, mottled with verdigris, of queens
that were fair and fatal, avid and insatiate of love or pain in lands the desert
has long obliterated, perchance thou viewest the implacable perverse nympholepsy
of thy mien. Or in the rusting shield of some ancestral warrior, peering with a
casual curiosity, thou findest thine eyes alone reflected in pools of clear
steel amid the tarnish, and in them a spark that seems to have fallen from the
perished flambeaux, a gleam from the brave and rutiIating camp-fires whose ashes
have fed the fertility of alien fields, sown and harvested a thousand times
since the red autumn of the last, legendary battle.