the hashish eater

• zihnin içinde yaratılan bin türlü oyunu dile getirildiği, uzun uğraşılar sonucu yazıldığı sanılan, fantastik bir clark ashton smith şiiridir. aynı zamanda the apocalypse of evil adıyla da anılan şiir, fantastik canlılar konulu bir belgesel tadını yaşatır. monstrous manual'i baştan sona okumakla birebire bir etki yaratabilir. konuyla ilgili olarak^* incelenebilecek bir başka yapıt, aldous huxley'nin yazdığı ve meskalin'e övgü olarak tanımlanabilen the doors of perception'dır.
  
  aynı zamanda, ilk defa marco polo tarafından kullanılmış assassini^* kelimesi, hashish eater anlamına da gelen arapça hashashin'den gelir. diğer bir taraftan, binbir gece masalları'nda 143. gece anlatılan^* aynı isimli ve 798. gece anlatılan ve iki kişinin başından geçen bir öykü de vardır.^*
  
  konuyla ilgili, son olarak verilmesi gereken örnek fitz hugh ludlow tarafından yazılan ve 1857 yılında ilk kez yayımlanan the hasheesh eater isimli kitaptır, ki içeriğinde aldous huxley'in biricik deneyinin 150 yıl önce yapılan bir benzerini bulmak mümkündür.
  
  merak edenler için clark ashton smith tarafından yazılan şiir şöyledir:
  
  bow down: i am the emperor of dreams;
  i crown me with the million-colored sun
  of secret worlds incredible, and take
  their trailing skies for vestment when i soar,
  throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
  the spaceward-flown horizons infinite.
  like rampant monsters roaring for their glut,
  the fiery-crested oceans rise and rise,
  by jealous moons maleficently urged
  to follow me for ever; mountains horned
  with peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed
  with sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued,
  usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain;
  and continents of serpent-shapen trees,
  with slimy trunks that lengthen league by league,
  pursue my light through ages spurned to fire
  by that supreme ascendance; sorcerers,
  and evil kings, predominanthly armed
  with scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin whereon
  are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame,
  would stay me; and the sirens of the stars,
  with foam-like songs from silver fragrance wrought,
  would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons
  where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell,
  with antic gnomes abominably wise,
  heave up their icy horns across my way.
  but naught deters me from the goal ordained
  by suns and eons and immortal wars,
  and sung by moons and motes; the goal whose name
  is all the secret of forgotten glyphs
  by sinful gods in torrid rubies writ
  for ending of a brazen book; the goal
  whereat my soaring ecstasy may stand
  in amplest heavens multiplied to hold
  my hordes of thunder-vested avatars,
  and promethèan armies of my thought,
  that brandish claspèd levins. there i call
  my memories, intolerably clad
  in light the peaks of paradise may wear,
  and lead the armageddon of my dreams
  whose instant shout of triumph is become
  immensity's own music: for their feet
  are founded on innumerable worlds,
  remote in alien epochs, and their arms
  upraised, are columns potent to exalt
  with ease ineffable the countless thrones
  of all the gods that are or gods to be,
  and bear the seats of asmodai and set
  above the seventh paradise.
  
  supreme
  in culminant omniscience manifold,
  and served by senses multitudinous,
  far-posted on the shifting walls of time,
  with eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields
  of utter night and chaos, i convoke
  the babel of their visions, and attend
  at once their myriad witness. i behold
  in ombos, where the fallen titans dwell,
  with mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat,
  the secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug
  beneath an alp-like buttress; and i list,
  too late, the clam of adamantine gongs
  dinned by their drowsy guardians, whose feet
  have fell the wasp-like sting of little knives
  embrued with slobber of the basilisk
  or the pail juice of wounded upas. in
  some red antarean garden-world, i see
  the sacred flower with lips of purple flesh,
  and silver-lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes
  of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests
  at moonless eve in terror seek to slay
  with bubbling grails of sacrificial blood
  that hide a hueless poison. and i read
  upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,
  the annulling word a spiteful demon wrote
  in gall of slain chimeras; and i know
  what pentacles the lunar wizards use,
  that once allured the gulf-returning roc,
  with ten great wings of furlèd storm, to pause
  midmost an alabaster mount; and there,
  with boulder-weighted webs of dragons' gut
  uplift by cranes a captive giant built,
  they wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird,
  and plucked from off his saber-taloned feet
  uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood,
  and amethysts from mars. i lean to read
  with slant-lipped mages, in an evil star,
  the monstrous archives of a war that ran
  through wasted eons, and the prophecy
  of wars renewed, which shall commemorate
  some enmity of wivern-headed kings
  even to the brink of time. i know the blooms
  of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury,
  that bloat within the creators of the moon,
  and in one still, selenic and fetor; and i know
  what clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown,
  are proffered to their gods in uranus
  by mole-eyed peoples; and the livid seed
  of some black fruit a king in saturn ate,
  which, cast upon his tinkling palace-floor,
  took root between the burnished flags, and now
  hath mounted and become a hellish tree,
  whose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths,
  net like a hundred ropes his lurching throne,
  and strain at starting pillars. i behold
  the slowly-thronging corals that usurp
  some harbour of a million-masted sea,
  and sun them on the league-long wharves of gold—
  bulks of enormous crimson, kraken-limbed
  and kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns
  the octiremes of perished emperors,
  and galleys fraught with royal gems, that sailed
  from a sea-fled haven.
  
  swifter and stranger grow
  the visions: now a mighty city looms,
  hewn from a hill of purest cinnabar
  to domes and turrets like a sunrise thronged
  with tier on tier of captive moons, half-drowned
  in shifting erubescence. but whose hands
  were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought
  to semblance of prodigious blooms of old,
  no eremite hath lingered there to say,
  and no man comes to learn: for long ago
  a prophet came, warning its timid king
  against the plague of lichens that had crept
  across subverted empires, and the sand
  of wastes that cyclopean mountains ward;
  which, slow and ineluctable, would come
  to take his fiery bastions and his fanes,
  and quench his domes with greenish tetter. now
  i see a host of naked gents, armed
  with horns of behemoth and unicorn,
  who wander, blinded by the clinging spells
  o hostile wizardry, and stagger on
  to forests where the very leaves have eyes,
  and ebonies like wrathful dragons roar
  to teaks a-chuckle in the loathly gloom;
  where coiled lianas lean, with serried fangs,
  from writhing palms with swollen boles that moan;
  where leeches of a scarlet moss have sucked
  the eyes of some dead monster, and have crawled
  to bask upon his azure-spotted spine;
  where hydra-throated blossoms hiss and sing,
  or yawn with mouths that drip a sluggish dew
  whose touch is death and slow corrosion. then
  i watch a war of pygmies, met by night,
  with pitter of their drums of parrot's hide,
  on plains with no horizon, where a god
  might lose his way for centuries; and there,
  in wreathèd light and fulgors all convolved,
  a rout of green, enormous moons ascend,
  with rays that like a shivering venom run
  on inch-long swords of lizard-fang.
  
  surveyed
  from this my throne, as from a central sun,
  the pageantries of worlds and cycles pass;
  forgotten splendors, dream by dream, unfold
  like tapestry, and vanish; violet suns,
  or suns of changeful iridescence, bring
  their rays about me like the colored lights
  imploring priests might lift to glorify
  the face of some averted god; the songs
  of mystic poets in a purple world
  ascend to me in music that is made
  from unconceivèd perfumes and the pulse
  of love ineffable; the lute-players
  whose lutes are strung with gold of the utmost moon,
  call forth delicious languors, never known
  save to their golden kings; the sorcerers
  of hooded stars inscrutable to god,
  surrender me their demon-wrested scrolls,
  lnscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies
  and awful transformations.
  
  if i will
  i am at once the vision and the seer,
  and mingle with my ever-streaming pomps,
  and still abide their suzerain: i am
  the neophyte who serves a nameless god,
  within whose fane the fanes of hecatompylos
  were arks the titan worshippers might bear,
  or flags to pave the threshold; or i am
  the god himself, who calls the fleeing clouds
  into the nave where suns might congregate
  and veils the darkling mountain of his face
  with fold on solemn fold; for whom the priests
  amass their monthly hecatomb of gems
  opals that are a camel-cumbering load,
  and monstrous alabraundines, won from war
  with realms of hostile serpents; which arise,
  combustible, in vapors many-hued
  and myrrh-excelling perfumes. it is i,
  the king, who holds with scepter-dropping hand
  the helm of some great barge of orichalchum,
  sailing upon an amethystine sea
  to isles of timeless summer: for the snows
  of hyperborean winter, and their winds,
  sleep in his jewel-builded capital,
  nor any charm of flame-wrought wizardry,
  nor conjured suns may rout them; so he fees,
  with captive kings to urge his serried oars,
  hopeful of dales where amaranthine dawn
  hath never left the faintly sighing lote
  and lisping moly. firm of heart, i fare
  impanoplied with azure diamond,
  as hero of a quest achernar lights,
  to deserts filled with ever-wandering flames
  that feed upon the sullen marl, and soar
  to wrap the slopes of mountains, and to leap
  with tongues intolerably lengthening
  that lick the blenchèd heavens. but there lives
  (secure as in a garden walled from wind)
  a lonely flower by a placid well,
  midmost the flaring tumult of the flames,
  that roar as roars a storm-possessed sea,
  impacable for ever; and within
  that simple grail the blossom lifts, there lies
  one drop of an incomparable dew
  which heals the parchèd weariness of kings,
  and cures the wound of wisdom. i am page
  to an emperor who reigns ten thousand years,
  and through his labyrinthine palace-rooms,
  through courts and colonnades and balconies
  wherein immensity itself is mazed,
  i seek the golden gorget he hath lost,
  on which, in sapphires fine as orris-seed,
  are writ the names of his conniving stars
  and friendly planets. roaming thus, i hear
  like demon tears incessant, through dark ages,
  the drip of sullen clepsydrae; and once
  in every lustrum, hear the brazen clocks
  innumerably clang with such a sound
  as brazen hammers make, by devils dinned
  on tombs of all the dead; and nevermore
  i find the gorget, but at length i find
  a sealèd room whose nameless prisoner
  moans with a nameless torture, and would turn
  to hell's red rack as to a lilied couch
  from that whereon they stretched him; and i find,
  prostrate upon a lotus-painted floor,
  the loveliest of all beloved slaves
  my emperor hath, and from her pulseless side
  a serpent rises, whiter than the root
  of some venefic bloom in darkness grown,
  and gazes up with green-lit eyes that seem
  like drops of cold, congealing poison.
  
  hark!
  what word was whispered in a tongue unknown,
  in crypts of some impenetrable world?
  whose is the dark, dethroning secrecy
  i cannot share, though i am king of suns,
  and king therewith of strong eternity,
  whose gnomons with their swords of shadow guard
  my gates, and slay the intruder? silence loads
  the wind of ether, and the worlds are still
  to hear the word that flees mine audience.
  in simultaneous ruin, al my dreams
  fall like a rack of fuming vapors raised
  to semblance by a necromant, and leave
  spirit and sense unthinkably alone
  above a universe of shrouded stars
  and suns that wander, cowled with sullen gloom,
  like witches to a sabbath. . . . fear is born
  in crypts below the nadir, and hath crawled
  reaching the floor of space, and waits for wings
  to lift it upward like a hellish worm
  fain for the flesh of cherubim. red orbs
  and eyes that gleam remotely as the stars,
  but are not eyes of suns or galaxies,
  gather and throng to the base of darkness; flame
  behind some black, abysmal curtain burns,
  implacable, and fanned to whitest wrath
  by raisèd wings that flail the whiffled gloom,
  and make a brief and broken wind that moans
  as one who rides a throbbing rack. there is
  a thing that crouches, worlds and years remote,
  whose horns a demon sharpens, rasping forth
  a note to shatter the donjon-keeps of time,
  or crack the sphere of crystal. all is dark
  for ages, and my toiling heart-suspends
  its clamor as within the clutch of death
  tightening with tense, hermetic rigors. then,
  in one enormous, million-flashing flame,
  the stars unveil, the suns remove their cowls,
  and beam to their responding planets; time
  is mine once more, and armies of its dreams
  rally to that insuperable throne
  firmed on the zenith.
  
  once again i seek
  the meads of shining moly i had found
  in some anterior vision, by a stream
  no cloud hath ever tarnished; where the sun,
  a gold narcissus, loiters evermore
  above his golden image. but i find
  a corpse the ebbing water will not keep,
  with eyes like sapphires that have lain in hell|
  and felt the hissing coals; and all the flowers
  about me turn to hooded serpents, swayed
  by flutes of devils in lascivious dance
  meet for the nod of satan, when he reigns
  above the raging sabbath, and is wooed
  by sarabands of witches. but i turn
  to mountains guarding with their horns of snow
  the source of that befoulèd rill, and seek
  a pinnacle where none but eagles climb,
  and they with failing pennons. but in vain
  i flee, for on that pylon of the sky
  some curse hath turned the unprinted snow to flame—
  red fires that curl and cluster to my tread,
  trying the summit's narrow cirque. and now
  i see a silver python far beneath-
  vast as a river that a fiend hath witched
  and forced to flow reverted in its course
  to mountains whence it issued. rapidly
  it winds from slope to crumbling slope, and fills
  ravines and chasmal gorges, till the crags
  totter with coil on coil incumbent. soon
  it hath entwined the pinnacle i keep,
  and gapes with a fanged, unfathomable maw
  wherein great typhon and enceladus
  were orts of daily glut. but i am gone,
  for at my call a hippogriff hath come,
  and firm between his thunder-beating wings
  i mount the sheer cerulean walls of noon
  and see the earth, a spurnèd pebble, fall—
  lost in the fields of nether stars—and seek
  a planet where the outwearied wings of time
  might pause and furl for respite, or the plumes
  of death be stayed, and loiter in reprieve
  above some deathless lily: for therein
  beauty hath found an avatar of flowers-
  blossoms that clothe it as a colored flame
  from peak to peak, from pole to sullen pole,
  and turn the skies to perfume. there i find
  a lonely castle, calm, and unbeset
  save by the purple spears of amaranth,
  and leafing iris tender-sworded. walls
  of flushèd marble, wonderful with rose,
  and domes like golden bubbles, and minarets
  that take the clouds as coronal-these are mine,
  for voiceless looms the peaceful barbican,
  and the heavy-teethed portcullis hangs aloft
  to grin a welcome. so i leave awhile
  my hippogriff to crop the magic meads,
  and pass into a court the lilies hold,
  and tread them to a fragrance that pursues
  to win the portico, whose columns, carved
  of lazuli and amber, mock the palms
  of bright aidennic forests-capitalled
  with fronds of stone fretted to airy lace,
  enfolding drupes that seem as tawny clusters
  of breasts of unknown houris; and convolved
  with vines of shut and shadowy-leavèd flowers
  like the dropt lids of women that endure
  some loin-dissolving ecstasy. through doors
  enlaid with lilies twined luxuriously,
  i enter, dazed and blinded with the sun,
  and hear, in gloom that changing colors cloud,
  a chuckle sharp as crepitating ice
  upheaved and cloven by shoulders of the damned
  who strive in antenora. when my eyes
  undazzle, and the cloud of color fades,
  i find me in a monster-guarded room,
  where marble apes with wings of griffins crowd
  on walls an evil sculptor wrought, and beasts
  wherein the sloth and vampire-bat unite,
  pendulous by their toes of tarnished bronze,
  usurp the shadowy interval of lamps
  that hang from ebon arches. like a ripple
  borne by the wind from pool to sluggish pool
  in fields where wide cocytus flows his bound,
  a crackling smile around that circle runs,
  and all the stone-wrought gibbons stare at me
  with eyes that turn to glowing coals. a fear
  that found no name in babel, flings me on,
  breathless and faint with horror, to a hall
  within whose weary, self-reverting round,
  the languid curtains, heavier than palls,
  unnumerably depict a weary king
  who fain would cool his jewel-crusted hands
  in lakes of emerald evening, or the field
  of dreamless poppies pure with rain. i flee
  onward, and all the shadowy curtains shake
  with tremors of a silken-sighing mirth,
  and whispers of the innumerable king,
  breathing a tale of ancient pestilence
  whose very words are vile contagion. then
  i reach a room where caryatids,
  carved in the form of voluptuous titan women,
  surround a throne flowering ebony
  where creeps a vine of crystal. on the throne
  there lolls a wan, enormous worm, whose bulk,
  tumid with all the rottenness of kings,
  overflows its arms with fold on creasèd fold
  obscenely bloating. open-mouthed he leans,
  and from his fulvous throat a score of tongues,
  depending like to wreaths of torpid vipers,
  drivel with phosphorescent slime, that runs
  down all his length of soft and monstrous folds,
  and creeping among the flowers of ebony,
  lends them the life of tiny serpents. now,
  ere the horror ope those red and lashless slits
  of eyes that draw the gnat and midge, i turn
  and follow down a dusty hall, whose gloom,
  lined by the statues with their mighty limbs,
  ends in golden-roofèd balcony
  sphering the flowered horizon.
  
  ere my heart
  hath hushed the panic tumult of its pulses,
  i listen, from beyond the horizon's rim,
  a mutter faint as when the far simoom,
  mounting from unknown deserts, opens forth,
  wide as the waste, those wings of torrid night
  that shake the doom of cities from their folds,
  and musters in its van a thousand winds
  that, with disrooted palms for besoms, rise,
  and sweep the sands to fury. as the storm,
  approaching, mounts and loudens to the ears
  of them that toil in fields of sesame,
  so grows the mutter, and a shadow creeps
  above the gold horizon like a dawn
  of darkness climbing zenith-ward. they come,
  the sabaoth of retribution, drawn
  from all dread spheres that knew my trespassing,
  and led by vengeful fiends and dire alastors
  that owned my sway aforetime! cockatrice,
  chimera, martichoras, behemoth,
  geryon, and sphinx, and hydra, on my ken
  arise as might some afrit-builded city
  consummate in the lifting of a lash
  with thunderous domes and sounding obelisks
  and towers of night and fire alternate! wings
  of white-hot stone along the hissing wind
  bear up the huge and furnace-hearted beasts
  of hells beyond rutilicus; and things
  whose lightless length would mete the gyre of moons—
  born from the caverns of a dying sun
  uncoil to the very zenith, half-disclosed
  from gulfs below the horizon; octopi
  like blazing moons with countless arms of fire,
  climb from the seas of ever-surging flame
  that roll and roar through planets unconsumed,
  beating on coasts of unknown metals; beasts
  that range the mighty worlds of alioth rise,
  afforesting the heavens with mulitudinous horns
  amid whose maze the winds are lost; and borne
  on cliff-like brows of plunging scolopendras,
  the shell-wrought towers of ocean-witches loom;
  and griffin-mounted gods, and demons throned
  on-sable dragons, and the cockodrills
  that bear the spleenful pygmies on their backs;
  and blue-faced wizards from the worlds of saiph,
  on whom titanic scorpions fawn; and armies
  that move with fronts reverted from the foe,
  and strike athwart their shoulders at the shapes
  the shields reflect in crystal; and eidola
  fashioned within unfathomable caves
  by hands of eyeless peoples; and the blind
  worm-shapen monsters of a sunless world,
  with krakens from the ultimate abyss,
  and demogorgons of the outer dark,
  arising, shout with dire multisonous clamors,
  and threatening me with dooms ineffable
  in words whereat the heavens leap to flame,
  advance upon the enchanted palace. falling
  for league on league before, their shadows light
  and eat like fire the arnaranthine meads,
  leaving an ashen desert. in the palace
  i hear the apes of marble shriek and howl,
  and all the women-shapen columns moan,
  babbling with terror. in my tenfold fear,
  a monstrous dread unnamed in any hall,
  i rise, and flee with the fleeing wind for wings,
  and in a trice the wizard palace reefs,
  and spring to a single tower of flame,
  goes out, and leaves nor shard nor ember! flown
  beyond the world upon that fleeing wind
  i reach the gulf's irrespirable verge,
  where fads the strongest storm for breath, and fall,
  supportless, through the nadir-plungèd gloom,
  beyond the scope and vision of the sun,
  to other skies and systems.
  
  in a world
  deep-wooded with the multi-colored fungi
  that soar to semblance of fantastic palms,
  i fall as falls the meteor-stone, and break
  a score of trunks to atom powder. unharmed
  i rise, and through the illimitable woods,
  among the trees of flimsy opal, roam,
  and see their tops that clamber hour by hour
  to touch the suns of iris. things unseen,
  whose charnel breath informs the tideless air
  with spreading pools of fetor, follow me,
  elusive past the ever-changing palms;
  and pittering moths with wide and ashen wings
  flit on before, and insects ember-hued,
  descending, hurtle through the gorgeous gloom
  and quench themselves in crumbling thickets. heard
  far off, the gong-like roar of beasts unknown
  resounds at measured intervals of time,
  shaking the riper trees to dust, that falls
  in clouds of acrid perfume, stifling me
  beneath an irised pall.
  
  now the palmettoes
  grow far apart, and lessen momently
  to shrubs a dwarf might topple. over them
  i see an empty desert, all ablaze
  with ametrysts and rubies, and the dust
  of garnets or carnelians. on i roam,
  treading the gorgeous grit, that dazzles me
  with leaping waves of endless rutilance,
  whereby the air is turned to a crimson gloom
  through which i wander blind as any kobold;
  till underfoot the grinding sands give place
  to stone or metal, with a massive ring
  more welcome to mine ears than golden bells
  or tinkle of silver fountains. when the gloom
  of crimson lifts, i stand upon the edge
  of a broad black plain of adamant that reaches,
  level as windless water, to the verge
  of all the world; and through the sable plain
  a hundred streams of shattered marble run,
  and streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze,
  like to the ruin of all the wars of time,
  to plunge with clangor of timeless cataracts
  adown the gulfs eternal.
  
  so i follow
  between a river of steel and a river of bronze,
  with ripples loud and tuneless as the clash
  of a million lutes; and come to the precipice
  from which they fall, and make the mighty sound
  of a million swords that meet a million shields,
  or din of spears and armour in the wars
  of half the worlds and eons. far beneath
  they fall, through gulfs and cycles of the void,
  and vanish like a stream of broken stars
  into the nether darkness; nor the gods
  of any sun, nor demons of the gulf,
  will dare to know what everlasting sea
  is fed thereby, and mounts forevermore
  in one unebbing tide.
  
  what nimbus-cloud
  or night of sudden and supreme eclipse,
  is on the suns opal? at my side
  the rivers run with a wan and ghostly gleam
  through darkness falling as the night that falls
  from spheres extinguished. turning, i behold
  betwixt the sable desert and the suns,
  the poisèd wings of all the dragon-rout,
  far-flown in black occlusion thousand-fold
  through stars, and deeps, and devastated worlds,
  upon my trail of terror! griffins, rocs,
  and sluggish, dark chimeras, heavy-winged
  after the ravin of dispeopled lands,
  and harpies, and the vulture-birds of hell,
  hot from abominable feasts, and fain
  to cool their beaks and talons in my blood—
  all, all have gathered, and the wingless rear,
  with rank on rank of foul, colossal worms,
  makes horrent now the horizon. from the wan
  i hear the shriek of wyvers, loud and shrill
  as tempests in a broken fane, and roar
  of sphinxes, like relentless toll of bells
  from towers infernal. cloud on hellish cloud
  they arch the zenith, and a dreadful wind
  falls from them like the wind before the storm,
  and in the wind my riven garment streams
  and flutters in the face of all the void,
  even as flows a flaffing spirit, lost
  on the pit s undying tempest. louder grows
  the thunder of the streams of stone and bronze—
  redoubled with the roar of torrent wings
  inseparable mingled. scarce i keep
  my footing in the gulfward winds of fear,
  and mighty thunders beating to the void
  in sea-like waves incessant; and would flee
  with them, and prove the nadir-founded night
  where fall the streams of ruin. but when i reach
  the verge, and seek through sun-defeating gloom
  to measure with my gaze the dread descent,
  i see a tiny star within the depths-
  a light that stays me while the wings of doom
  convene their thickening thousands: for the star
  increases, taking to its hueless orb,
  with all the speed of horror-changèd dreams,
  the light as of a million million moons;
  and floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed
  it grows and grows, a huge white eyeless face
  that fills the void and fills the universe,
  and bloats against the limits of the world
  with lips of flame that open . . .