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

YOU are as gold as the half—ripe grain that merges to gold again, as white as the white rain that beats through

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

O be swift— we have always known you wanted us… We fled inland with our flocks. we pastured them in hollows, cut off from the wind

Each of us like you has died once, has passed through drift of wood—l… cracked and bent and tortured and unbent

Bear me to Dictaeus, and to the steep slopes; to the river Erymanthus. I choose spray of dittany, cyperum, frail of flower,

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

The mysteries remain, I keep the same cycle of seed—time and of sun and rain; Demeter in the grass,

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),

NOR skin nor hide nor fleece Shall cover you, Nor curtain of crimson nor fine Shelter of cedar—wood be over you, Nor the fir—tree

Will you glimmer on the sea? Will you fling your spear—head On the shore? What note shall we pitch? We have a song,

Stars wheel in purple, yours is no… as Hesperus, nor yet so great a st… as bright Aldeboran or Sirius, nor yet the stained and brilliant… stars turn in purple, glorious to…