Where Love and Slumber Are the Same

October
by Clark Ashton Smith

The blood of wounded love is on your leaves, October,
And in your seaward wind the sigh of love foredone:
Though I should fold them round me, cerement-like and sober,
In all your mist and rain is no oblivion,
Where memory clings the closer for the perished sun.
The blood of wounded love is on your leaves, October.

By you I am betrayed to all my memories,
Autumn, whose cleaving colors are a fallen sword!
Your distant vales are blue as Aidenn, yet no ease
I find therein, but pain against my coming stored:
Autumn, whose heart is one with all lost things adored,
By you I am betrayed to all my memories.

I would the mounded snow of mountains hyperborean
Were heaped upon your latest ember, quenching it!
In some tremendous world of ice, or world marmorean,
I would entomb for aye my fevers infinite:—
Yea, well it were to lie in frozen sleep unlit
Beneath the mounded snow of mountains hyperborean.

Ah, that my love and all your leaves, on Lethe drifting
Were borne, and cast upon the secret isles of sleep,
Where love and slumber are the same, and suns unlifting
And gods and men go down to quaff the dreamless deep:
Autumn, I would that thou and I were one in sleep,
With this my love and all your leaves on Lethe drifting.