Slow Smoke/Altyn

by Lew Sarett

ALTYN

Altyn, the world's most wicked city, Altyn—
All the old wranglers who jingled in the days
Of open range, and all the Vigilantes,
Cupping their palsied hands behind their ears,
Still shift reflective cuds and wag their heads
Whenever barroom talk swings around to Altyn,
The world's most wicked city.

The world's most wicked city.Oh, sinful enough
It was when Silver Britt, of Kootenai,
Staked out his claim in Blackfoot Basin, sank
His mattock into a seam of golden luck,
And opened the Yellow Mary; when all the gates
Of hell went out and poured upon the town
A flood of rustlers, mountebanks, and harpies—
As when a logging-dam, with a mighty groan
Gives way and looses on a tranquil valley
A pent up avalanche of rotting weeds
And slithering débris.

And slithering débris. In a turbulent tide,
From every stagnant bayou of the earth
They tumbled; outlaws, renegades, and boomers,
Rakehells and courtezans and roustabouts—
The scum of every region—over the hills
They streamed, and eddied in the town of Altyn:
Alkali Brown, who ran the faro-bank
And left the miners stripped of every nugget,
With pokes as empty as a beggar's cup
Would be upon the reeling streets of Altyn;
And Kansas Kitty, vast, oleaginous,
Who amorously engulfed her maudlin guests
With ardor more fierce than Arizona noon—
The while, subtle of touch, five crooked fingers
Slipped through the sliding panel in the wall
And filched their dangling pockets; Jules Boidreau,
The Dude of Kootenai, who conjured gold-dust
Out of the money-belts of all the cruisers,
With deft white hands and the subtle abracadabra
Of walnut shells and temperamental peas.

Oh, never the tremble of a gentle tear
In the world's most wicked city; never a man
Whose heart would yield the flower of compassion.
Not even Gentleman Joe, who worked his spells
With fan-tan, chuc-a-luck, and three-card monte,
Suave as the blade of any butter-knife;
Nor even Effie Golden—she of the eyes
As wistful as a mating antelope's—
She of the lips suffused with all the warmth
Of scarlet poppies after rain—Effie,
Nobody's woman, the woman of every man—
Effie, who coiled her undulating white
Of arms about young Calvin McElroy,
Who dubbed himself a circuit-riding parson—
Effie, who breathed a passion on his mouth
That melted his will as a blow-torch melts a candle—
Effie, who poured the poison of her blood
Into his veins, and flung him out in the pink
Of morning, to stagger to his hut, shattered,
Blighted, as when a sound white apple takes
The worm from a rotten apple at its side.

Oh, desert winds fling handfuls of alkali
And dust upon the moldering bones of Altyn;
The face of Yellow Mary Mountain, pocked
By a thousand mattocks, robbed of its golden teeth,
Looks down with a crooked smile and leers at Altyn;
When hollow moon is hooked among the pines,
The lobo, squat on a carcass, lifts his head
And quavers a melancholy requiem—
Where clanking skeletons of mining-rig
And darkly looming winch are silhouetted
Against the moon, like gibbets dangling the ghosts
Of once high dreams of Altyn.

Of once high dreams of Altyn.Nothing remains
Of the world's most wicked city; nothing remains,
Except a solitary grave that rambles
With clematis, and mallows salmon-red,
Planted by McElroy's fast-rotting fingers,
Patterned about by skulls of buffalos—
Dark-socketed tenements of drowsy bees
And darting centipedes; and girdling the mound,
Like a bulwark against the world, a wall of stone,
Painfully quarried, painfully hewn, and lifted
Painfully into place by bleeding hands;
And on the hillock, within this miniature
God's Acre, a weary weathered shingle leaning
Upon the wind, and deeply carved by hands
Palsied with fever: Effie Golden—gone.
Oh, nothing remains, nothing remains of Altyn,
Where never the eye of any man had known
The glint and tremble of a gentle tear;
Where never the stony furrows of a heart
Had yielded up the flower of compassion.