Slow Smoke/Altyn
ALTYN
Altyn, the world's most wicked city, Altyn—All the old wranglers who jingled in the daysOf open range, and all the Vigilantes,Cupping their palsied hands behind their ears,Still shift reflective cuds and wag their headsWhenever barroom talk swings around to Altyn,The world's most wicked city.
The world's most wicked city.Oh, sinful enoughIt was when Silver Britt, of Kootenai,Staked out his claim in Blackfoot Basin, sankHis mattock into a seam of golden luck,And opened the Yellow Mary; when all the gatesOf hell went out and poured upon the townA flood of rustlers, mountebanks, and harpies—As when a logging-dam, with a mighty groanGives way and looses on a tranquil valleyA pent up avalanche of rotting weedsAnd slithering débris.
In a turbulent tide,From every stagnant bayou of the earthThey tumbled; outlaws, renegades, and boomers,Rakehells and courtezans and roustabouts—The scum of every region—over the hillsThey streamed, and eddied in the town of Altyn:Alkali Brown, who ran the faro-bankAnd left the miners stripped of every nugget,With pokes as empty as a beggar's cupWould be upon the reeling streets of Altyn;And Kansas Kitty, vast, oleaginous,Who amorously engulfed her maudlin guestsWith ardor more fierce than Arizona noon—The while, subtle of touch, five crooked fingersSlipped through the sliding panel in the wallAnd filched their dangling pockets; Jules Boidreau,The Dude of Kootenai, who conjured gold-dustOut of the money-belts of all the cruisers,With deft white hands and the subtle abracadabraOf walnut shells and temperamental peas.
Oh, never the tremble of a gentle tearIn the world's most wicked city; never a man Whose heart would yield the flower of compassion.Not even Gentleman Joe, who worked his spellsWith fan-tan, chuc-a-luck, and three-card monte,Suave as the blade of any butter-knife;Nor even Effie Golden—she of the eyesAs wistful as a mating antelope's—She of the lips suffused with all the warmthOf scarlet poppies after rain—Effie,Nobody's woman, the woman of every man—Effie, who coiled her undulating whiteOf arms about young Calvin McElroy,Who dubbed himself a circuit-riding parson—Effie, who breathed a passion on his mouthThat melted his will as a blow-torch melts a candle—Effie, who poured the poison of her bloodInto his veins, and flung him out in the pinkOf morning, to stagger to his hut, shattered,Blighted, as when a sound white apple takesThe worm from a rotten apple at its side.
Oh, desert winds fling handfuls of alkaliAnd 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 headAnd quavers a melancholy requiem—Where clanking skeletons of mining-rigAnd darkly looming winch are silhouettedAgainst the moon, like gibbets dangling the ghostsOf once high dreams of Altyn.
Of once high dreams of Altyn.Nothing remainsOf the world's most wicked city; nothing remains,Except a solitary grave that ramblesWith clematis, and mallows salmon-red,Planted by McElroy's fast-rotting fingers,Patterned about by skulls of buffalos—Dark-socketed tenements of drowsy beesAnd darting centipedes; and girdling the mound,Like a bulwark against the world, a wall of stone,Painfully quarried, painfully hewn, and liftedPainfully into place by bleeding hands;And on the hillock, within this miniature God's Acre, a weary weathered shingle leaningUpon the wind, and deeply carved by handsPalsied with fever: Effie Golden—gone.Oh, nothing remains, nothing remains of Altyn,Where never the eye of any man had knownThe glint and tremble of a gentle tear;Where never the stony furrows of a heartHad yielded up the flower of compassion.