Impatient as we were for all of them to join us, 
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away 
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth 
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you call them— 
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last. 
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.

They are the same aren’t they, 
The presumed landscape and the dream of home 
Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping, 
Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes 
Became so extraneous and so near 
To create a foreground of quiet knowledge 
In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that 
Will sign for old age 
And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.