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Will you bring to me my ceremony

In what clothes I have now demanded it?

Or stay yet on the dull border of things,

White blooms of air erupting from your lips,

In mushroomlike ascent and in the colour

Of the water that, bending, now disperse—

Will you? Are these arctiidae that gather

At your nostrils, or of some manufacture

Else, of which I know no more than horror?

Our centuries have gone above us to

Where coral breaks the starshoals. The bear,

Once my companion, dances for another King.

I wait only for your word or your touch

To tell me that the music has elapsed

And we return into the earth, that all

Our lineage give out and like the lantern

The curtain quieted, dim. I will go down

Gracefully, as if a final sovereignty

Allowed itself to lead me there. My crown

Holds in its band the stars and all my making :

Nephropid, I wake, dressed in my armour.

Let us leave this dream, my last child—

I see where sparks blow out upon the tide.