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.