Читать книгу Adventure Tales #4 - Seabury Quinn - Страница 6

ADVENTURE, by Clark Ashton Smith

Let us leave the hateful town

With its stale, forgotten lies;

Far beneath renewing skies,

Where the piny slope goes down,

All with April love and laughter—

None to leer and none to frown—

We shall pass and follow after

Shattered lace of waters spun

On a steep and stony loom

Down the depths of laurel-gloom.

Finding there a world re-made

In the fern-embowered shade,

Weaving bright oblivion

Still from frailest blossom-trove,

We shall mix our wilding love

With the woodland and the sun.

*****

Let us loiter, hand in hand,

Hearing but the heart’s command,

Half our steps by kisses stayed,

Prove the spring-enchanted glade;

Breast to breast and limb to limb,

Seize our happiness and bind it—

Lose the pulse of time and find it,

Free as vagrant seraphim.

Ever leave regret and rue

To the dutiful and jealous

Fools that are not near to tell us

All the things we should not do.

*****

Though the bedded ferns be broken,

And dishevelled blossoms lie

On the rumpled moss for token

Of the day’s mad errantry—

Still the tacit pines will keep

Darkly in their sighing sleep

All the sweet and perilous story;

And the oaks and willows hoary

For unheeding ears will tell

Only things ineffable;

And the later eyes that look

On the pool-delaying brook,

Shall not see within its glass

Two that came to kiss and pass.