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The Poems of Octavio Paz

Page 16

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

 

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