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 buck-wheat,

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 bug, 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.