They are odd creatures, all: flighty, fleeting, though there is occasional magnificence in their scribings; even here, where time and death sit lightly, it does not pay to grow attached. But your claws skim across a story of love in common verse – the dying tale of one who watched the stars, all fond and never fearful – and for one fragmentary second, the arc of eternity lost is so briefly recaptured; you are not like Veils, all mad in your melancholy, but you have yearned, and you have striven in your chains, and in those words you see that they have yearned and striven too.

She, you think, who wrote this – could you take but one of them with you, when you fly again.

.

(I apologize for not even attempting to capture Pages’s... unique... vocabulary, and the poem he’s thinking of, if it isn’t obvious, is this one:

https://www.naic.edu/~gibson/poems/swilliams1.html)