by Octavio Paz
the rocks weigh
no more than our shadows.
Identity
In the patio a bird squawks,
a penny in a money-box.
Its feathers are a little air,
and vanish in a sudden flare.
There’s no bird, perhaps, and no man,
that one in the patio where I am.
Walking Through the Light
You lift your left
foot forward the day
stops and laughs
and starts to step lightly
while the sun stands still
You lift your right
foot forward the sun
strolls lightly
along the day that’s
at a standstill in the trees
Breast high you stroll
the trees walk the sun
follows you the day
goes off to meet you the sky
invents sudden clouds
Identical Time
It is not the wind
not the steps of the water sleepwalking
past the petrified houses and the trees
far from the reddish night
it is not the sea climbing the stairs
Everything is still the natural world is at rest
It is the city turning on its shadow
searching always searching itself
lost in its immensity
never catching up never able to abandon itself
I close my eyes and watch the cars go by
they flare up and burn out and flare up
burn out I don’t know where they’re going
All of us going to die What else do we know?
On a bench an old man talks to himself
To whom do we talk talking to ourselves?
He’s forgotten his past he will not reach the future
He doesn’t know who he is
alive in the middle of the night talking to hear himself
A couple embraces by an iron railing
she laughs and asks something
her question floats up and opens high above
At this hour there’s not a wrinkle in the sky
three leaves fall from a tree
someone whistles on the corner
a window lights in the house across the way
How strange to know yourself as alive!
To walk among people
with the open secret of being alive
Dawns with no one in the Zócalo
only our delirium and the streetcars
Tacuba Tacubaya Xochimilco San Ángel Coyoacán
in the plaza bigger than the night
lit ready to take us
through the vastness of the hour to the end of the world
Black rays
trolley poles erect against a sky of stone
their tuft of sparks small tongues of fire
ember that punctures the night bird
flying whistling flying
among the tangled shadows of the ash trees
in a double file from San Pedro to Mixcoac
Green-black vault mass of humid silence
in flames above our heads
while we talk shouting
on the straggling streetcars
that cross the suburbs
with the crash of towers crumbling
If I am alive I still walk
those same pitted streets
muddy puddles from June to September
entranceways high mud walls sleeping gardens
watched only by white purple white
the smell of the flowers the ghost clusters of grapes
In the darkness a streetlight almost alive
against the unyielding wall A dog cries
questions to the night There’s no one
the wind has come into the park
Clouds clouds gestation and ruin and more clouds
fallen temples new dynasties
reefs and disasters in the sky Sea above
high plains clouds Where is the other sea?
Mistresses of eyes clouds
architects of silence
And suddenly for no reason
the word would appear alabaster
thin unsummoned transparency
You said I will make music with it
castles of syllables You made nothing
Alabaster without flower or scent
stalk without blood or sap
lopped whiteness throat only a throat
a song with no feet no head
Today I am alive and without nostalgia
the night flows the city flows
I write on this page that flows
I shuttle with these shuttling words
The world did not begin with me
it will not end with me I am
one pulsebeat in the throbbing river
Twenty years ago Vasconcelos told me
“Devote yourself to philosophy
It won’t give you life but it is a defense against death”
And Ortega y Gasset in the bar of the Hôtel du Rhône
“Learn German
and apply yourself to thinking Forget the rest”
I do not write to kill time
nor to revive it
I write that I may live and be revived
This afternoon from a bridge I saw
the sun enter the waters of the river
All was in flames
the statues the houses the porticoes burned
In the gardens feminine clusters of grapes
ingots of liquid light
the coolness of solar vessels
The poplar a foliage of sparks
the water horizontal unmoving
under the flaming earths and skies
Each drop of water a fixed eye
the weight of enormous beauty
on each open eye
Reality suspended on the stalk of time
beauty weighs nothing Peaceful reflection
time and beauty are the same light and water
Gaze that sustains the loveliness
time enchanted in a gaze
world weightless as man is weighted
Is not beauty enough? I know nothing
I know what is too much not what is enough
Ignorance is as difficult as beauty
someday I will know less and open my eyes
Perhaps time doesn’t pass
images of time pass
and if the hours do not come back presences come back
There is another life within this life
that fig tree will come back tonight
other nights return tonight
As I write I hear the river go by
not this that which is this
The back and forth of moments and visions
blackbird on a gray stone
in the clarity of March black
center of clarities
Not the marvelous presented but the present sensed
the presence with nothing more
nothing more full and abundant
It is not memory nothing thought nor desired
Not the same hours others
are always others and are the same
they enter and drive us from ourselves
they see with our eyes what eyes do not see
There is another time within time
still with no hours no weight no shadow
without past or future only alive
like the old man on the bench
indivisible identical perpetual
We never see it It is transparency
Cosante
With a slit tongue
and open eyes
the nightingale on the ramparts
Eyes of stored-up pain
and feathers of blood
the nightingale on the ramparts
Feathers of blood and brief dazzle
fresh water given birth in the throat
the nightingale on the ramparts
Water that runs stricken with love
water with wings
the nightingale on the ramparts
Among black stones the white voice
of love-struck water
the nightingale on the ramparts
Singing with slit tongue
blood on the stone
the nightingale on the ramparts
[DL]
Motion
If you are the amber mare
I am the road of blood
If you are the first snow
I am he who lights the hearth of dawn
If you are the tower of night
I am the spike burning in your mind
If you are the morning tide
I am the cry of the first bird
If you are the basket of oranges
I am the knife of the sun
If you are the stone altar
I am the sacrilegious hand
If you are the sleeping land
I am the green sugarcane
If you are the wind’s leap
I am the buried fire
If you are the water’s mouth
I am the mouth of moss
If you are the forest of the clouds
I am the ax that parts it
If you are the profaned city
I am the rain of consecration
If you are the yellow mountain
I am the red arms of lichen
If you are the rising sun
I am the road of blood
Duration
Thunder and wind: duration.
I Ching
I
Sky black Yellow earth
The rooster tears the night apart
The water wakes and asks what time it is
The wind wakes and asks for you
A white horse goes by
II
As the forest in its bed of leaves
you sleep in your bed of rain
you sing in your bed of wind
you kiss in your bed of sparks
III
Multiple vehement odor
many-handed body
On an invisible stem a single
whiteness
IV
Speak listen answer me
what the thunderclap
says, the woods
understand
V
I enter by your eyes
you come forth by my mouth
You sleep in my blood
I waken in your head
VI
I will speak to you in stone-language
(answer with a green syllable)
I will speak to you in snow-language
(answer with a fan of bees)
I will speak to you in water-language
(answer with a canoe of lightning)
I will speak to you in blood-language
(answer with a tower of birds)
[DL]
To Touch
My hands
open the curtains of your being
dress you in another nakedness
discover the bodies of your body
My hands
invent another body for your body
Counterparts
In my body you search the mountain
for the sun buried in its forest.
In your body I search for the boat
adrift in the middle of the night.
Rotation
Tall column of pulsebeats
on the unmoving axis of time
the sun dresses and undresses you
The day shakes loose from your body
and is lost in your night
The night shakes loose from your day
and is lost in your body
You are never the same
you have always just arrived
you have been here since the beginning
The Bridge
Between now and now,
between I am and you are,
the word bridge.
Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring.
From one bank to another,
always a body stretched:
a rainbow.
I’ll sleep beneath its arches.
Interior
Warring thoughts
want to split my skull
This writing moves
through streets of birds
My hand thinks out loud
a word calls to another
On the page where I write
I see beings come and go
Book and notebook
unfold their wings and rest
Lamps are lit the hour
opens and closes like a bed
With red stockings and a pale face
you and the night come in
Across
I turn the page of the day,
writing what I’m told
by the motion of your eyelashes.
*
I enter you,
the truthfulness of the dark.
I want proof of the darkness, want
to drink the black wine:
take my eyes and crush them.
*
A drop of night
on your breast’s tip:
mysteries of the carnation.
*
Closing my eyes
I open them inside your eyes.
*
Always awake
on its garnet bed:
your wet tongue.
*
There are fountains
in the garden of your veins.
*
With a mask of blood
I cross your thoughts blankly:
amnesia guides me
to the other side of life.
Odd or Even
A weightless word
to greet the day
a word for setting sail
Ah!
*
Rings under your eyes
in your face it still is night
*
An invisible necklace of glances
fastened around your throat
*
While the newspapers
pontificate
you surround yourself with birds
*
We are like water in water
like the water that keeps the secret
*
A glance ties
and another unties you
scattered by transparency
*
Your breasts between my hands
water again rushes down
*
From one balcony (The fan)
to another (opens)
the sun leaps (and closes)
Last Dawn
Your hair lost in the forest,
your feet touching mine.
Asleep you are bigger than the night,
but your dream fits within this room.
How much we are who are so little!
/> Outside a taxi passes
with its load of ghosts.
The river that runs by is always
running back.
Will tomorrow be another day?
Salamander
Salamander
(the fire wears
black armor)
a slow-burning stove
between the jaws
—marble or brick—
of the chimney it is
an ecstatic tortoise, a crouched
Japanese warrior:
whatever it is, martyrdom
is repose
impassive under torture
Salamander
ancient name of fireand ancient
antidote to fire
flayed sole of the foot
on hot coals
amianthus amante amianthus
Salamander
in the abstract city between
dizzy geometries
—glass cement stone iron—
formidable chimeras appear
raised up by calculus
multiplied by profit
by the side of the anonymous wall
sudden poppy
Salamander
Yellow claw a scrawl
of red letters on a
wall of salt Claw of sunlight
on a heap of bones
Salamander
fallen star
in the endlessness of bloodstained opal
ensepulchred
beneath eyelids of quartz
lost girl
in tunnels of onyx
in the circles of basalt
buried seed grain of energy
in the marrow of granite
Salamander, you who lay dynamite in iron’s
black and blue breast
you explode like a sun
you open yourself like a wound
you speak as a fountain speaks
Salamander blade of wheat
daughter of fire
spirit of fire
condensation of blood
sublimation of blood
evaporation of blood
Salamander of air
the rock is flame the flame is smoke
red vaporstraight-rising prayer
lofty word of praise
exclamation crown
of fire on the head of the psalm
