Alchemy

This is another poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS) that was never published during his lifetime, so here's the complete text:

In smoke, in tapered darkness, and in mist,
Above the fateful suspect Flame suspended

My foaming loves distill.  I watch, as might

Some other and some darker Alchemist

Observe the starry bubbles dim or splendid

With the immense alembic of the night.

You have not come...and time stands over me,

A torturer, inquisitorial, and I seem

Supine in some colossal hour-glass, where the sands,

Burning and rasping, fall in my bared heart

______________________________days.

The last line is apparently obscured in the original manuscript now in the collections of the John Hay Library at Brown University.

Compared to the poem "Geometries", which I read yesterday, the metaphor at the heart of "Alchemy" is much more effective, particularly in the second stanza, where the speaker feels himself to be "Supine in some colossal hour-glass".  The speaker may be something of a romantic alchemist, but his powers fail to deliver the object of his affections to him.