How you rise from the past to me here,
pallid and wonderstruck schoolgirl,
at whose bidding the months, the fixed
and the lengthening months, turn for admonishment.

Your eyes struggled like oarsmen
in the perishing infinite
with a dream's expectation and the palpable
presences cast up by the sea.

Out of the faraway, where
the smell of the land is unplaceable
and twilight comes weeping
in a shadowy semblance of poppies.

Under daylight's immobile meridian,
daily the catalept drowsed, a child
in the blaze of your radiance,
insensate and proved, like a sword.

While deeper in shadow, from
the leisurely lapse of oblivion,
the flower of your solitude, tumid in earth
like a lengthening winter, grows ample.