Titulo poema

White Buildings

Where the cedar leaf divides the skyI heard the sea.In sapphire arenas of the hillsI 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 pearsIn moonlit bushelsAnd 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 cheeksThe rain dried without odour.

“It is not long, it is not long;See where the red and blackVine-stanchioned valleys-”: but the windDied speaking through the ages that you knowAnd bug, chimney-sooted heart of man!So was I turned about and back, much as your smokeCompiles a too well-known biography.

The evening was a spear in the ravineThat throve through very oak. And had I walkedThe dozen particular decimals of time?Touching an opening laurel, I foundA 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, fleeingUnder the constant wonder of your eyes-.”

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

from White Buildings (1926)