Chairondas traveled to Opium, to the place of Cincinattus, scholar and sage of some renown, his house

In the tips of the peaks, on Opium's mountain, where the clouds

swirl by like skims of cream, and the skin of the sky

Is solid and different. The lights shift in the upper air, and the sun frowns in multicolored radiance of being. There

The swift chariot of Phoebus makes its rounds in gold-broad brilliance, there

The moon proceeds through the court of her stately grace like a nacreous pearl; while she watches

The fires of the Achaeans are all glittering below, hundreds of fires, thousands of fires, winking and twinkling like a piece of the milky way cut up with a scissors and sprinkled, sprinkled liberally on the outstretched darkling earth, looking up at their mother.

Oh how the nacreous mother mourns when the camps wink out! Mourns with the coming of dawn, to see her children flee by the bridle of swift Aurora -- with the flaming eyes! -- the steed snorts impatiently, paws the ground, gallops off and the charyots are rising, clamps like the clatter of swords and the shouts, death screams and triumphs, and brown soaked with blood! Mourn or rage triumphant, and all of this

None of the wise Cincinattus' concern. He belabors his days perusing

The histories of Persia, of the Orient, of the East. Paging through many a crumbling page

His fingers perch on the word, he opens another book and examines the word, he forms in his mind the image of the word like the slice of a peach floating in the soft and subtle cream, like the slice of dawn through the crack in his window and the steaming, burnt-out candle's ashen

Edge in the pearly sky (gone the nacreous moon) and his mind

Is like butter and not lacking fatigue.

So he dreams of peaches and orchards, and the white grapes he used to pick from his mother's
Garden, like pearls, like little gems of emerald and sapphire in his stretching hands the plums and the olives would fall.

Oh the glorious of globe: he awakes with a start; a knock on the door.

"I am in love with a woman of hair like the silver chaplet of a marbled angel, and I've chaised her in Europe and Asia, the East and the West, but she smiles with teeth like pearls, a rosy white by the sheen of her skin, and she does not care with her copper brows."

"Youth comes to love with age; let the simmer in your heart fire, let it flame, let it burn down forests and whole icy lands where the crystal palaces perch unevenly in the first dropping of snow, the first falling of wintery freezes, only to be shattered by the light of an august sun."

"The snows won't fall in August but the winds blow cold in autumn and I shiver for the chill. Throw another log on the fire."

He cuts a thick leg from the chair and the little corners of flame sizzle about it, the curls of smoke claw round the nails, the pegs (for from oak, for from knotted, proud-strong limbs of iron
Oak) are last to catch, and crackle with resentful steam. Cincinattus strokes his long beard, fine like a sheep's fur, and purses flaking lips, and gnarls a gnarled, oak-like face.

"What is the cure for love, Chairondas? There was a medicine in Asia, in the east. The sages," he flips Confucist lore, bound in leather and brass, "Say the trick was to burn together

A mixture of tea-leaves, powdered flint; the combustion

Explodes and the thick scent

Rises to the nostrils, impels it through the seeping brain. But not just any tea; the leaves
Gathered from orange trees at the end of the world, for there too the thirsty orange hungers their roots

To the depths of the earth; lyre strings mixed in liberally, of course, that goes without saying,
And a bit of powdered fluff from the first spring hare: that makes good tea."

"Sicilius," (for that his other name)

"I respect your ancient lore and books, but I think the words have been

Misprinted and some drama mixed in with the rest.

I read of a golden cup off the other side of Attica wherein was kept

(and here he draws a breath)

The elixir of Plato's philosophy, whose theft

Was sacred by the fingered rivers of Oenoe;

The Hero came long ago, and threw it into the stream, and whoever drinks deep of that

Drinks deep of love."

Now the old man, Silenus, confounded by the change, let the milk of the fading day

Pore over his brows and spill down his chin, and watched for the growing flames and the oyst-made
Sky, and took to uttering one of his prophetic

Cuts of wisdom, which he made like the greased hands of peasants

Potatos and stews for the slaves:

"Sweet in the first morning, and last with the dew
Lasting into the rivers of honey, the milk-dripping
argo of argus-eyed buds. Come in the flower,
When the long corollas hang
Down their sipping pendants of life."