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The Gnome
31 July 1943
There is a Gnome In the iron mountains of the western desert Where the jagged spires of the granite rimrock Come ripping up through the corroded foothills
And he lives in these iron mountains This Gnome And he plays on the flame seared plains below With his trails of dust and his twisting thermals That begin nowhere and end in swirling nothingness
And he swims over the heat choked ravines Flowing ever and around the blistering hearth stones The chipped and glowing walls of the open hearth stones This Gnome—whose furnace breath Is the rippling heat of the bake oven Pulsing and shimmering on the desert floor And in whose cupped and twisted hands The molten hyalesence Of the mirage is prisoned
And he feeds on the fires in his crucible This Gnome Feeding and swimming in the fluid seas of the Flame Winds In the viscous, liquid heat of the burning Flame Winds Which lick the baked and scorching clay with tongues Of fire that seem as serpent shappen flames To bathe the nether islands of the sun At their dire perihelion
And this amorphous Gnome Like some smoke-pillared djinn a god evoked To stand the watch of Cerberus Above the river Phlegethon—has found Beneath the slabs of basalt that are split And rivened by the long diurnal siege A noduled grain mercuric that had seeped And sweated from the smelt of cinnabar This Gnome—this entity—this eidolon Self-procreate of fire and flame and heat This Gnome
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