Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, 
Light wrestling there incessantly with light, 
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto 
Your body rocking! 
And where death, if shed, 
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,— 
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn 
The silken, skilled transmemberment of song; 
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands . . . 
Ill 
Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime, 
Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast 
Together in one merciless white blade— 
The bay estuaries flock the hard sky limite. 
—As if too brittle or too clear to touch! 
The cables of our sleep, so swiftly filed, 
Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars. 
One frozen trackless smile: what words 
Gan strangle this deaf moonlight? For me 
Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword 
Gan fasten or deflect this tidal wedge, 
Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved 
And changed . . . “There’s 
Nothing like this in the world—,” you say, 
Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look 
Too, into that cleft of godless sky 
Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing. 
“—And never to quite understand!” No, 
In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed 
Nothing so flagless as this piracy. 
But now 
Draw in your head, alone, and too tall here. 
Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam; 
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know: 
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.