Are you alive? I touch you. You quiver like a sea—fish. I cover you with my net. What are you —banded one?

Weed, moss—weed, root tangled in sand, sea—iris, brittle flower, one petal like a shell is broken,

Thou art come at length More beautiful Than any cool god In a chamber under Lycia’s far coast,

Whirl up, sea— whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our rocks, hurl your green over us,

Where the slow river meets the tide, a red swan lifts red wings and darker beak, and underneath the purple down

White, O white face— from disenchanted days wither alike dark rose and fiery bays: no gift within our hands,

Over and back, the long waves crawl and track the sand with foam; night darkens, and the sea takes on that desperate tone

So you have swept me back, I who could have walked with the l… above the earth, I who could have slept among the l… at last;

Silver dust lifted from the earth, higher than my arms reach, you have mounted. O silver,

I first tasted under Apollo’s lip… love and love sweetness, I, Evadne; my hair is made of crisp violets or hyacinth which the wind combs b…

I should have thought in a dream you would have brought some lovely, perilous thing, orchids piled in a great sheath, as who would say (in a dream),