by Octavio Paz
Lingam and yoni.
As the goddess to the god,
you surround me, night.
Cool terrace.
You are immense, immense
is your measure.
Inhuman stars.
But this hour is ours.
I fall and rise,
I burn, drenched.
Are you only one body?
Birds on the water,
dawn on eyelids.
Self-absorbed,
high as death,
the marble sprouts.
Hushed palaces,
whiteness adrift.
Women and children
on the roads:
scattered fruit.
Rags or rays of lightning?
A procession on the plain.
Silver running cool
and clanking:
ankle and wrist.
In a rented costume
the boy goes to his wedding.
Clean clothes
spread out on the rocks.
Look at them and say nothing.
On the little island
monkeys with red asses screech.
Hanging from the wall,
a dark and angry sun:
wasps’ nest.
And my head is another sun,
full of black thoughts.
Flies and blood.
A small goat skips
in Kali’s court.
Gods, men, and beasts
eat from the same plate.
Over the pale god
the black goddess dances,
decapitated.
Heat, the hour split open,
and those mangoes, rotten . . .
Your face, the lake:
smooth, without thoughts.
A trout leaps.
Lights on the water:
souls sailing.
Ripples:
the golden plain—and the cleft . . .
Your clothes nearby.
I, like a lamp
on your shadow body.
A living scales:
bodies entwined
over the void.
The sky crushes us,
the water sustains us.
I open my eyes:
so many trees
were born tonight.
What I’ve seen here, what I say,
the white sun erases.
The Other
He invented a face for himself. Behind it
he lived died and was reborn
many times. His face now
has the wrinkles from that face.
His wrinkles have no face.
Epitaph for an Old Woman
They buried her in the family tomb
and in the depths the dust
of what was once her husband trembled.
Happiness in Herat
for Carlos Pellicer
I came here
as I write these lines,
with no fixed idea:
a blue and green mosque,
six truncated minarets,
two or three tombs,
memorials to a poet-saint,
the names of Timur and his line.
I met the wind of the hundred days.
It covered all the nights with sand,
badgered my forehead, scorched my eyelids.
Daybreak: scattering of birds
and that murmur of water on stones:
the footsteps of peasants.
(But the water tasted like dust.)
Whispers on the plains,
appearances disappearances,
golden whirlwinds
insubstantial as my thoughts.
Turning and turning
in a hotel room or in the hills:
the land a graveyard of camels
and in my quarrels always
the same crumbling faces.
Is the wind, lord of ruins,
my only master?
Erosions:
less grows more and more.
At the saint’s tomb,
I drove a nail
deep into the dry tree, not
like the others, against the evil eye:
against myself. (I said something:
words the wind carried away.)
One afternoon the heights made a pact.
The poplars walked going nowhere.
Sun on the tiles sudden springtimes.
In the Ladies’ Garden
I climbed to the turquoise cupola.
Minarets tattooed with signs:
the Cufic scripts, beyond letters,
became transparent.
I did not have the imageless vision,
I did not see forms whirl until they vanished
in unmoving clarity,
the being without substance of the Sufis.
I did not drink the plenitude in the void,
nor see the thirty-two marks
of the Bodhisattva’s diamond body.
I saw a blue sky and all the blues,
from white to green,
the spread fan of the poplars,
and, on a pine, more air than bird,
a black and white mynah.
I saw the world resting on itself.
I saw the appearances.
And I named that half-hour:
The Perfection of the Finite.
The Effects of Baptism
Young Hassan,
in order to marry a Christian,
was baptized. The priest
named him Erik,
as though he were a Viking. Now
he has two names
but only one wife.
Proof
If man is dust
those traveling across the plain
are men
Village
The stones are time Wind
centuries of wind The trees are time
the people stones Wind
turns on itself and is buried
in the stone day
There’s no water but their eyes shine
Himachal Pradesh (1)
for Juan Liscano
I saw
at the foot of the ridge
horizons undone
(In the skull of a horse
a hive of diligent bees)
I saw
vertigo petrified
the hanging gardens of asphyxia
(A tiger butterfly
motionless on the tip of a scent)
I saw
the mountains of the sages
where the wind mangles eagles
(A girl and an old woman, skin and bones
carry bundles bigger than these peaks)
Daybreak
Hands and lips of water
heart of water eucalyptus
campground of the clouds
the life that is born every day
the death that is born every life
I rub my eyes:
the sky walks the land
Interruptions from the West (3)
(Mexico City: The 1968 Olympiad)
for Dore and Adja Yunkers
Lucidity (perhaps it’s worth
writing across the purity
of this page) is not lucid:
it is fury (yellow and black
mass of bile in Spanish)
spreading over the page.
Why? Shame is anger
turned against oneself: if
an entire nation is ashamed
&nb
sp; it is a lion poised
to leap. (The municipal
employees wash the blood
from the Plaza of the Sacrificed.)
Look now stained
before anything worth it
was said: lucidity.
Nightfall
What sustains it,
the half-closed clarity of nightfall,
its light let loose in the gardens?
All the branches,
conquered by the weight of birds,
lean toward the darkness.
Moments, self-absorbed and pure,
still gleam
on the brambled tops of walls.
To welcome night,
the groves become
hushed fountains.
A bird swoops,
the grass grows dark,
edges blur, lime is black,
the world is less believable.
Exclamation
Stillness not on the branch
in the air Not in the air
in the moment hummingbird
Reading John Cage
Read unread:
Music without measurements,
sounds passing through circumstances.
Within me I hear them passing outside,
outside me I see them passing with me.
I am the circumstance.
Music:
I hear within what I see outside,
I see within what I hear outside.
(Duchamp: I can’t hear myself hearing.) I am
an architecture of instantaneous sounds
on a space that disintegrates (Everything
we come across is to the point.) Music
invents silence, architecture
invents space. Factories of air.
Silence is the space of music:
a confined space:
there is no silence
except in the mind. Silence is an idea,
the fixed idea of music.
Music is not an idea: it is movement,
sounds walking over the silence.
(Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it.)
Silence is music, music is not silence.
Nirvana is Samsara, Samsara is not Nirvana.
Knowledge is not knowledge: a recovery of ignorance,
the knowledge of knowledge. It is not the same,
hearing footsteps this afternoon
among the trees and houses, as
seeing this same afternoon
among the same trees and houses now after reading
Silence: Nirvana is Samsara,
silence is music.
(Let life obscure the difference between art and life.)
Music is not silence: it is not saying
what silence says, it is saying
what it doesn’t say.
Silence has no meaning,
meaning has no silence.
Without being heard music slips between the two.
(Every something is an echo of nothing.)
In the silence of my room the murmur of my body:
unheard. One day I will hear its thoughts.
The afternoon
has stopped: and yet—it goes on.
My body hears the body of my wife(a cable of sound)
and answers: this is called music.
Music is real, silence is an idea.
John Cage is Japanese and is not an idea:
he is sun on snow. Sun and snow are not the same:
sun is snow and snow is snow or
sun is not snow nor is snow snow
or John Cage is not American
(U.S.A. is determined to keep the Free World free,
U.S.A. determined) or
John Cage is American (that the U.S.A. may become
just another part of the world. No more, no less.)
Snow is not sun, music is not silence,
sun is snow, silence is music.
(The situation must be Yes-and-No, not either-or.)
Between silence and music, art and life,
snow and sun, there is a man.
That man is John Cage (committed
to the nothing in between). He says a word:
not snow not sun, a word
which is not silence:
A year from Monday you will hear it.
The afternoon has become invisible.
Concert in the Garden
(Vina y Mridangam)
for Carmen Figueroa de Mayer
It rained.
The hour is an enormous eye.
Inside it, we come and go like reflections.
The river of music
enters my blood.
If I say body, it answers wind.
If I say earth, it answers where?
The world, a double blossom, opens:
sadness of having come,
joy of being here.
I walk lost in my own center.
Distant Neighbor
Last night an ash tree
was about to tell
me something—and didn’t.
Writing
I draw these letters
as the day draws its images
and blows over them and does not return
Concord
for Carlos Fuentes
Water above
Grove below
Wind on the roads
Quiet well
Bucket’s black Spring water
Water coming down to the trees
Sky rising to the lips
Wind from All Compass Points
The present is motionless
The mountains are of bone and of snow
they have been here since the beginning
The wind has just been born ageless
as the light and the dust A windmill of sounds
the bazaar spins its colors bells motors radios
the stony trot of dark donkeys
songs and complaints entangled
among the beards of the merchants
the tall light chiseled with hammer-strokes
In the clearings of silence boys’ cries
explode
Princes in tattered clothes
on the banks of the tortured river
pray pee meditate
The present is motionless
The floodgates of the year open day flashes out
agate
The fallen bird
between rue Montalambert and rue de Bac
is a girl held back
at the edge of a precipice of looks
If water is fire flame
dazzled
in the center of the spherical hour a sorrel filly
A marching battalion of sparks a real girl
among wraithlike houses and people
Presence a fountain of reality
I looked out through my own unrealities
I took her hand together we crossed
the four quadrants the three times
floating tribes of reflections
and we returned to the day of beginning
The present is motionless June 21st
today is the beginning of summer Two or three birds
invent a garden You read and eat a peach
on the red couch naked
like the wine in the glass pitcher
A great flock of crows
Our brothers are dying in Santo Domingo
“If we had the munitions You people would not be here”
We chew our nails down to the elbow
In the gardens of his summer fortress
Tipu Sultan planted the Jacobin tree
then distributed glass shards among
the imprisoned English officers
and ordered them to cut their foreskins
and eat them The century
has set fire to itself in our lands
Will the builders of cathedrals and pyramids
charred hands raise their transparent houses
by its light?
The present is motionless
The sun has fallen asleep between your breasts
The red covering is black and heaves
Not planet and not jewel fruit
you are named date
Datia
castle of Leave-If-You-Can scarlet stain
upon the obdurate stone
Corridors terraces
stairways
dismantled nuptial chambers
of the scorpion Echoes repetitions
the intricate and erotic works of a watch beyond time
You cross
taciturn patios under the pitiless afternoon
a cloak of needles on your untouched shoulders
If fire is water you are a diaphanous drop
the real girl transparency of the world
The present is motionless The mountains
quartered suns
petrified storm earth-yellow The wind whips
it hurts to see
The sky is another deeper abyss
Gorge of the Salang Pass
black cloud over black rock
Fist of blood strikes gates of stone
Only the water is human
in these precipitous solitudes
Only your eyes of human water Down there
in the cleft
desire covers you with its two black wings
Your eyes flash open and close phosphorescent animals
Down there the hot canyon
the wave that stretches and breaks your legs apart
the plunging whiteness
the foam of our bodies abandoned
The present is motionless
The hermit watered the saint’s tomb
his beard was whiter than the clouds
Facing the mulberry on the flank of the rushing stream
you repeat my name dispersion of syllables
A young man with green eyes presented you
with a pomegranate On the other bank of the Amu-Darya
smoke rose from Russian cottages
