Passage

Where the cedar leaf divides the sky I heard the sea. In sapphire arenas of the hills I was promised an improved infancy.

Sulking, sanctioning the sun, My memory I left in a ravine,-- Casual louse that tissues the buckwheat, Aprons rocks, congregates pears In moonlit bushels And wakens alleys with a hidden cough.

Dangerously the summer burned (I had joined the entrainments of the wind). The shadows of boulders lengthened my back: In the bronze gongs of my cheeks The rain dried without odour.

“It is not long, it is not long; See where the red and black Vine-stanchioned valleys--”: but the wind Died speaking through the ages that you know And hug, chimney-sooted heart of man! So was I turned about and back, much as your smoke Compiles a too well known biography.

The evening was a spear in the ravine That throve through very oak. And had I walked The dozen particular decimals of time? Touching an opening laurel, I found A thief beneath, my stolen book in hand.

“Why are you back here--smiling an iron coffin?” “To argue with the laurel,” I replied: “Am justified in transience, fleeing Under the constant wonder of your eyes--.”

He closed the book. And from the Ptolemies Sand troughed us in a glittering abyss. A serpent swam a vertex to the sun --On unpaced beaches leaned its tongue and drummed. What fountains did I hear? what icy speeches? Memory, committed to the page, had broke.