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.