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The Poems of Octavio Paz

Page 19

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

 

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