Your chamber was the
steaming
Nile!
Oscar Wilde - Poetry
Or did you love the god of flies who plagued the Hebrews and was
splashed
With wine unto the waist? or Pasht, who had green beryls for her eyes?
Or that young god, the Tyrian, who was more amorous than the dove
Of Ashtaroth? or did you love the god of the Assyrian
Whose wings, like strange transparent talc, rose high above his
hawk-faced head,
Painted with silver and with red and ribbed with rods of Oreichalch?
Or did huge Apis from his car leap down and lay before your feet
Big blossoms of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured nenuphar?
* * * * *
HOW subtle-secret is your smile! Did you love none then? Nay, I know
Great Ammon was your bedfellow! He lay with you beside the Nile!
The river-horses in the slime trumpeted when they saw him come
Odorous with Syrian galbanum and smeared with spikenard and with
thyme.
He came along the river bank like some tall galley argent-sailed,
He strode across the waters, mailed in beauty, and the waters sank.
He strode across the desert sand: he reached the valley where you lay:
He waited till the dawn of day: then touched your black breasts with
his hand.
You kissed his mouth with mouths of flame: you made the horned god
your own:
You stood behind him on his throne: you called him by his secret name.
You whispered monstrous oracles into the caverns of his ears:
With blood of goats and blood of steers you taught him monstrous
miracles.
White Ammon was your bedfellow!
Your chamber was the steaming Nile!
And with your curved archaic smile you watched his passion come and
go.
* * * * *
WITH Syrian oils his brows were bright: and wide-spread as a tent at
noon
His marble limbs made pale the moon and lent the day a larger light.
His long hair was nine cubits' span and coloured like that yellow gem
Which hidden in their garment's hem the merchants bring from
Kurdistan.
His face was as the must that lies upon a vat of new-made wine:
The seas could not insapphirine the perfect azure of his eyes.
His thick soft throat was white as milk and threaded with thin veins
of blue:
And curious pearls like frozen dew were broidered on his flowing silk.
* * * * *
ON pearl and porphyry pedestalled he was too bright to look upon:
For on his ivory breast there shone the wondrous ocean-emerald,
That mystic moonlit jewel which some diver of the Colchian caves
Had found beneath the blackening waves and carried to the Colchian
witch.
Before his gilded galiot ran naked vine-wreathed corybants,
And lines of swaying elephants knelt down to draw his chariot,
And lines of swarthy Nubians bare up his litter as he rode
Down the great granite-paven road between the nodding peacock-fans.
The merchants brought him steatite from Sidon in their painted ships:
The meanest cup that touched his lips was fashioned from a chrysolite.
The merchants brought him cedar chests of rich apparel bound with
cords:
His train was borne by Memphian lords: young kings were glad to be his
guests.
Ten hundred shaven priests did bow to Ammon's altar day and night,
Ten hundred lamps did wave their light through Ammon's carven
house--and now
Foul snake and speckled adder with their young ones crawl from stone
to stone
For ruined is the house and prone the great rose-marble monolith!
Wild ass or trotting jackal comes and couches in the mouldering gates:
Wild satyrs call unto their mates across the fallen fluted drums.
And on the summit of the pile the blue-faced ape of Horus sits
And gibbers while the fig-tree splits the pillars of the peristyle
* * * * *
THE god is scattered here and there: deep hidden in the windy sand
I saw his giant granite hand still clenched in impotent despair.
And many a wandering caravan of stately negroes silken-shawled,
Crossing the desert, halts appalled before the neck that none can
span.
And many a bearded Bedouin draws back his yellow-striped burnous
To gaze upon the Titan thews of him who was thy paladin.
* * * * *
GO, seek his fragments on the moor and wash them in the evening dew,
And from their pieces make anew thy mutilated paramour!
