by Octavio Paz
and drinks from itself, spilling over,
the moment, translucent, seals itself off
and ripens inward, sends out roots,
grows within me, taking me over,
its feverish leafing drives me away,
my thoughts are nothing more than its birds,
its mercury runs through my veins, tree
of the mind, fruit that tastes of time,
oh life to live, life already lived,
time that comes back in a swell of sea,
time that recedes without turning its head,
the past is not past, it is still passing by,
flowing silently into the next vanishing moment:
in an afternoon of stone and saltpeter,
armed with invisible razors you write
in red illegible script on my skin,
and the wounds dress me like a suit of flames,
I burn without end, I search for water,
in your eyes there’s no water, they’re made of stone,
and your breasts, your belly, your hips are stone,
your mouth tastes of dust, your mouth tastes
like poisoned time, your body tastes
like a well that’s been sealed, passage of mirrors
where anxious eyes repeat, passage
that always leads back to where it began,
you take me, a blind man, led by the hand,
through relentless galleries toward the center
of the circle, and you rise like splendor
hardened into an ax, like light that flays,
engrossing as a gallows is to the doomed,
flexible as whips and thin as a weapon
that’s twin to the moon, your sharpened words
dig out my chest, depopulate me
and leave me empty, one by one
you extract my memories, I’ve forgotten my name,
my friends grunt in a wallow with the pigs
or rot in ravines eaten by the sun,
there is nothing inside me but a large wound,
a hollow place where no one goes,
a windowless present, a thought that returns
and repeats itself, reflects itself,
and loses itself in its own transparency,
a mind transfixed by an eye that watches
it watching itself till it drowns itself
in clarity: I saw your horrid scales,
Melusina, shining green in the dawn,
you slept twisting between the sheets,
you woke shrieking like a bird,
and you fell and fell, till white and broken,
nothing remained of you but your scream,
and I find myself at the end of time
with bad eyes and a cough, rummaging through
the old photos: there’s no one, you’re no one,
a heap of ashes and a worn-out broom,
a rusted knife and a feather-duster,
a pelt that hangs from a pack of bones,
a withered branch, a black hole,
and there at the bottom the eyes of a girl
drowned a thousand years ago,
glances buried deep in a well,
glances that have watched us since the beginning,
the girl’s glance of the aged mother
who sees her grown son a young father,
the mother’s glance of the lonely girl
who sees her father a young son,
glances that watch us from the depths
of life, and are the traps of death
—or what if that falling into those eyes
were the way back to true life?
to fall, to go back, to dream myself,
to be dreamed by other eyes that will come,
another life, other clouds,
to die yet another death!
—this night is enough, this moment that never
stops opening out, revealing to me
where I was, who I was, what your name is,
what my name is: was it I making plans
for the summer—and for all the summers—
on Christopher Street, ten years ago,
with Phyllis, who had two dimples in her cheeks
where sparrows came to drink the light?
on the Reforma did Carmen say to me,
“the air’s so crisp here, it’s always October,”
or was she speaking to another I’ve forgotten,
or did I invent it and no one said it?
in Oaxaca was I walking through a night
black-green and enormous as a tree,
talking to myself like the crazy wind,
and reaching my room—always a room—
was it true the mirrors didn’t know me?
did we watch the dawn from the Hotel Vernet
dancing with the chestnut trees—
did you say “it’s late,” combing your hair,
did I watch the stains on the wall and say nothing?
did the two of us climb the tower together,
did we watch evening fall on the reef?
did we eat grapes in Bidart? in Perote
did we buy gardenias? names, places,
streets and streets, faces, plazas,
streets, a park, stations, single
rooms, stains on the wall, someone
combing her hair, someone dressing,
someone singing at my side, rooms,
places, streets, names, rooms,
Madrid, 1937,
in the Plaza del Ángel the women were sewing
and singing along with their children,
then: the sirens’ wail, and the screaming,
houses brought to their knees in the dust,
towers cracked, facades spat out
and the hurricane drone of the engines:
the two took off their clothes and made love
to protect our share of all that’s eternal,
to defend our ration of paradise and time,
to touch our roots, to rescue ourselves,
to rescue the inheritance stolen from us
by the thieves of life centuries ago,
the two took off their clothes and kissed
because two bodies, naked and entwined,
leap over time, they are invulnerable,
nothing can touch them, they return to the source,
there is no you, no I, no tomorrow,
no yesterday, no names, the truth of two
in a single body, a single soul,
oh total being . . . rooms adrift
in the foundering cities, rooms and streets,
names like wounds, the room with windows
looking out on other rooms
with the same discolored wallpaper,
where a man in shirtsleeves reads the news
or a woman irons; the sunlit room
whose only guest is the branches of a peach;
and the other room, where it’s always raining
outside on the patio and the three boys
who have rusted green; rooms that are ships
that rock in a gulf of light; rooms
that are submarines: where silence dissolves
into green waves, and all that we touch
phosphoresces; and the tombs of luxury,
with their portraits nibbled, their rugs unraveling;
and the traps, the cells, the enchanted grottoes,
the bird cages and the numbered rooms,
all are transformed, all take flight,
every moulding is a cloud, every door
leads to the sea, the country, the open
air, every table is set for a banquet;
impenetrable as conches, time lays siege
to them in vain, there is no more time,
there are no walls: space, space,
open your hand, gather these riches,
pluck the fruit, eat of life,
stretch out under the tree and drink!
all is transformed, all is sacred,
every room is the center of the world,
it’s still the first night, and the first day,
the world is born when two people kiss,
a drop of light from transparent juices,
the room cracks half-open like a fruit
or explodes in silence like a star,
and the laws chewed away by the rats,
the iron bars of the banks and jails,
the paper bars, the barbed wire,
the rubber stamps, the pricks and goads,
the droning one-note sermon on war,
the mellifluous scorpion in a cap and gown,
the top-hatted tiger, chairman of the board
of the Red Cross and the Vegetarian Society,
the schoolmaster donkey, the crocodile cast
in the role of savior, father of the people,
the Boss, the shark, the architect of the future,
the uniformed pig, the favorite son
of the Church who washes his blackened dentures
in holy water and takes classes in civics
and conversational English, the invisible walls,
the rotten masks that divide one man
from another, one man from himself, they crumble
for one enormous moment and we glimpse
the unity that we lost, the desolation
of being man, and all its glories,
sharing bread and sun and death,
the forgotten astonishment of being alive;
to love is to battle, if two kiss
the world changes, desires take flesh,
thoughts take flesh, wings sprout
on the backs of the slave, the world is real
and tangible, wine is wine, bread
regains its savor, water is water,
to love is to battle, to open doors,
to cease to be a ghost with a number
forever in chains, forever condemned
by a faceless master; the world changes
if two look at each other and see,
to love is to undress our names:
“let me be your whore” said Héloise,
but he chose to submit to the law
and made her his wife, and they rewarded him
with castration; better the crime,
the suicides of lovers, the incest committed
by brother and sister like two mirrors
in love with their likeness, better to eat
the poisoned bread, adultery on a bed
of ashes, ferocious love, the poisonous
vines of delirium, the sodomite who wears
a gob of spit for a rose in his lapel,
better to be stoned in the plaza than to turn
the mill that squeezes out the juice of life,
that turns eternity into empty hours,
minutes into prisons, and time into
copper coins and abstract shit;
better chastity, the invisible flower
that rocks atop the stalks of silence,
the difficult diamond of the holy saints
that filters desires, satiates time,
the marriage of quietude and motion,
solitude sings within its corolla,
every hour is a petal of crystal,
the world strips off its masks,
and at its heart, a transparent shimmer
that we call God, nameless being
who studies himself in the void, faceless
being emerged from himself, sun
of suns, plenitude of presences and names;
I follow my raving, rooms, streets,
I grope my way through corridors of time,
I climb and descend its stairs, I touch
its walls and do not move, I go back
to where I began, I search for your face,
I walk through the streets of myself
under an ageless sun, and by my side
you walk like a tree, you walk like a river,
and talk to me like the course of a river,
you grow like wheat between my hands,
you throb like a squirrel between my hands,
you fly like a thousand birds, and your laugh
is like the spray of the sea, your head
is a star between my hands, the world
grows green again when you smile,
eating an orange, the world changes
if two, dizzy and entwined, fall
on the grass: the sky comes down, trees
rise, space becomes nothing but light
and silence, open space for the eagle
of the eye, the white tribe of clouds
goes by, and the body weighs anchor,
the soul sets sail, and we lose
our names and float adrift in the blue
and green, total time where nothing
happens but its own, easy crossing,
nothing happens, you’re quiet, you blink,
(silence: just now an angel crossed,
huge as the life of a hundred suns),
is nothing happening, only a blink?
—and the banquet, the exile, the first crime,
the jawbone of the ass, the opaque thud
and the startled glance of the dead falling
on an ash-strewn plain, Agamemnon’s
great bellow, the screams of Cassandra,
over and over, louder than the sea,
Socrates in chains (the sun rises,
to die is to wake: “Crito, a cock
for Aesculapius, I am cured of life”),
the jackal discoursing in the ruins of Nineveh,
the shade that appeared to Brutus on the eve
of the battle, Moctezuma insomniac
on his bed of thorns, the ride in the carriage
toward death—the interminable ride,
counted minute by minute by Robespierre,
his broken jaw between his hands,
Churruca on his cask like a scarlet throne,
the numbered steps of Lincoln as he left
for the theater, Trotsky’s death-rattle
and his howl like a boar, Madero’s gaze
that no one returned: why are they killing me?,
and the curses, the sighs, the silence
of the criminal, the saint, the poor devil,
graveyards of anecdotes and phrases scratched up
by rhetorical dogs, the animal who’s dying
and knows it, the useless common knowledge,
the dark sound of the falling stone, the monotonous
sound of bones being crushed in the fray
and the foaming mouth of the prophet
and his scream and the scream of the hangman
and the scream of the victim . . . eyes are flames,
what they see is flames, the ear a flame
and sounds a flame, lips are coals,
the tongue is a poker, touch and the touched,
thought and the thought-of, he who thinks
is flame, all is burning, the universe
is flame, the nothing is burning, the nothing
that is only a thought in flames, and noth
ing
in the end but smoke: there is no victim,
there is no hangman . . . and the cry on Friday
afternoon?, and the silence covered in signs,
the silence that speaks without ever speaking,
does it say nothing? are cries nothing?
does nothing happen as time passes by?
—nothing happens, only a blink
of the sun, nothing, barely a motion,
there is no redemption, time can never
turn back, the dead are forever
fixed in death and cannot die
another death, they are untouchable,
frozen in a gesture, and from their solitude,
from their death, they watch us,
helpless, without ever watching,
their death is now a statue of their life,
an eternal being eternally nothing,
every minute is eternally nothing,
a ghostly king rules over your heartbeat
and your final expression, a hard mask
is formed over your changing face:
the monument that we are to a life,
unlived and alien, barely ours,
—when was life ever truly ours?
when are we ever what we are?
we are ill-reputed, nothing more
than vertigo and emptiness, a frown in the mirror,
horror and vomit, life is never
truly ours, it always belongs to the others,
life is no one’s, we all are life—
bread of the sun for the others,
the others that we all are—,
when I am I am another, my acts
are more mine when they are the acts
of others, in order to be I must be another,
leave myself, search for myself
in the others, the others that don’t exist
if I don’t exist, the others that give me
total existence, I am not,
there is no I, we are always us,
life is other, always there,
further off, beyond you and
beyond me, always on the horizon,
life which unlives us and makes us strangers,
that invents our face and wears it away,
hunger for being, oh death, our bread,
Mary, Persephone, Héloise, show me
your face that I may see at last
my true face, that of another,
my face forever the face of us all,
face of the tree and the baker of bread,
face of the driver and the cloud and the sailor,
face of the sun and face of the stream,
face of Peter and Paul, face
of this crowd of hermits, wake me up,
I’ve already been born: life and death
make a pact within you, lady of night,
