by Octavio Paz
The sound of an Uzbek flute
was another river invisible clearer
The boatman on the barge was strangling chickens
The countryside is an open hand its lines
marks of a broken alphabet
Cow skeletons on the prairie
Bactria a shattered statue
I scraped a few names out of the dust
By these fallen syllables
seeds of a charred pomegranate
I swear to be earth and wind whirling
over your bones
The present is motionless
Night comes down with its trees
night of electric insects and silken beasts
night of grasses which cover the dead
meeting of waters which come from far off
rustlings universes are strewn about
a world falls a seed flares up
each word beats I hear you throb in the shadow
a riddle shaped like an hourglass woman asleep
Space living spaces
Anima mundi maternal substance
always torn from itself
always falling into your empty womb Anima mundi
mother of the nomadic tribes of suns and men
The spaces turn the present is motionless
At the top of the world
Shiva and Parvati caress Each caress lasts a century
for the god and for the man an identical time
an equivalent hurling headlong Lahore
red river black boats
a barefoot girl between two tamarinds
and her timeless gaze An identical throbbing
death and birth
A group of poplars
suspended between sky and earth
they are a quiver of light more than a trembling of leaves
Do they rise or fall?
The present is motionless It rains on my childhood
it rains on the feverish garden
flint flowers trees of smoke
In a fig leaf you sail on my brow
The rain does not wet you
you are a flame of water the diaphanous drop of fire
spilling upon my eyelids
I look out through my own unrealities
the same day is beginning Space wheels
the world wrenches up its roots
Our bodies stretched out?
weigh no more than dawn
[PB]
Madrigal
More transparent
than this water dropping
through the vine’s twined fingers
my thoughts stretch a bridge
from yourself to yourself Look at you
more real than the body you inhabit
fixed at the center of my mind
You were born to live on an island
With Eyes Closed
With eyes closed
you light up within
you are blind stone
Night after night I carve you
with eyes closed
you are frank stone
We have become enormous
just knowing each other
with eyes closed
Passage
More than air more than water
more than lips lighter lighter
Your body is the trace of your body
Maithuna
My eyes discover you
naked and cover you
with a warm rain
of glances
*
A cage of sounds open
to the morning whiter
than your thighs at night
your laughter and even more your foliage
your blouse of the moon as you leap from bed
Sifted light the singing spiral
spools whiteness Chiasm
X planted in a chasm
*
My day exploded
in your night Your shriek
leaps in pieces Night
spreads your body
washing under your bodies
knot
Your body once again
*
Vertical hour drought
spins its flashing wheels
Garden of knives feast of deceit
Through these reverberations you enter
unscathed the river of my hands
*
Quicker than fever
you swim in darkness your shadow clearer
between caresses your body blacker
You leap to the bank of the improbable
toboggans of how when because yes
Your laughter burns your clothes your laughter
soaks my forehead my eyes my reasoning
Your body burns your shadow
You swing on a trapeze of fear
the terrors of your childhood watch me
from your cliffhanging eyes wide open
making love at the cliff
Your body brighter your shadow blacker
You laugh over your ashes
*
Burgundy tongue of the flayed sun
tongue that licks your land of sleepless dunes
hair unpinned tongue of whips
spoken tongues
unfastened on your back enlaced
on your breasts writing that writes you
with spurred letters denies you
with branded signs dress that undresses you
writing that dresses you in riddles
writing in which I am buried Hair unpinned
the great night sudden over your body
jar of hot wine spilled
on the tablets of the law
knot of howling and cloud of silence
cluster of snakes cluster of grapes
trampled by the cold soles of the moon
rain of hands leaves fingers wind
on your body on my body on your body
Hair unpinned foliage of the tree of bones
the tree of aerial roots that drink night from the sun
The tree of flesh The tree of death
*
Last night in your bed
there were three of us:
you and me and the moon
*
I open the lips of your night
damp hollows unborn
echoes: whiteness
a rush of unchained water
*
To sleep to sleep in you
or even better to wake to open my eyes
at your center black white black
white To be the unsleeping sun
your memory ignites (and
the memory of me in your memory)
*
And again the sap skywise
rises (salvia your name
is flame) Sapling
crackling (rain
of blazing snow) My tongue
is there (Your rose
burns through the snow) is
now (I seal your sex)
dawn
from danger drawn
Axis
Through the conduits of blood
my body in your body spring of night
my tongue of sun in your forest a trough your body
I red wheat Through the conduits of bone
I night I water I forest moving forward
I tongue I body
I bone of the sun
Through the conduits of night spring of bodies
You night of wheat you forest in the sun
you waiting water you trou
gh of bones
Through the conduits of sun my night in your night
my sun in your sun my wheat in your trough
your forest in my tongue Through the conduits of the body
water in the night your body in my body
Spring of bones Spring of suns
Monstrance
Sunday on the Island of Elephanta
Imprecation
At the feet of the sublime sculptures,
vandalized by the Muslims and the Portuguese,
the crowds have left a picnic of garbage
for the crows and dogs.
I condemn them to be reborn a hundred times
on a dungheap, and as for the others,
for eons they must carve living flesh
in the hell for the mutilators of statues.
Invocation
Shiva and Parvati: we worship you
not as gods but as images
of the divinity of man.
You are what man makes and is not,
what man will be
when he has served the sentence of hard labor.
Shiva: your four arms are four rivers,
four jets of water. Your whole being is a fountain
where the lovely Parvati bathes,
where she rocks like a graceful boat.
The sea beats beneath the sun:
it is the great lips of Shiva laughing;
the sea is ablaze:
it is the steps of Parvati on the waters.
Shiva and Parvati: the woman who is my wife
and I ask you for nothing, nothing
that comes from the other world: only
the light on the sea,
the barefoot light on the sleeping land and sea.
A Tale of Two Gardens
A house, a garden, are not places:
they spin, they come and go. Their apparitions open
another space in space,
another time in time. Their eclipses
are not abdications:
the vivacity of one of those moments would burn us
if it lasted a moment more. We are condemned
to kill time: so we die,
little by little. A garden is not a place.
Down a path of reddish sand,
we enter a drop of water,
drink green clarities from its center,
we climb the spiral of hours
to the tip of the day, descend
to the last burning of its ember.
Mumbling river, the garden flows through the night.
That one in Mixcoac, abandoned,
covered with scars, was a body
at the point of collapse. I was a boy,
and the garden for me was like a grandfather.
I clambered up its leafy knees,
not knowing it was doomed.
The garden knew it: it awaited its destruction
as a condemned man awaits the axe.
The fig tree was a goddess, the Mother.
Hum of irascible insects,
the muffled drums of the blood,
the sun and its hammer,
the green hug of innumerable limbs.
The cleft in the trunk: the world half-opened.
I thought I had seen death: I saw
the other face of being, the feminine void,
the fixed featureless splendor.
White leagues batter
the peak of Ajusco, turn black,
a purple mass, a great bulge splitting open:
the rainsquall’s gallop covers the plain.
Rain on lava: the water dances
on bloodstained stone. Light, light:
the stuff of time and its inventions.
Months like mirrors,
one by the other reflected and effaced.
Days when nothing happens,
studying an ants’ nest,
its subterranean labor,
its fierce rites. Immersed in the cruel light,
I washed my ants’ nest body, I watched
the restless construction of my ruin.
Elytra: the insect’s razor song
slices the dry grass. Mineral cacti,
quicksilver lizards in adobe walls,
the bird that drills through space,
thirst, tedium, clouds of dust,
impalpable epiphanies of wind.
The pines taught me to talk to myself.
In that garden I learned to wave myself goodbye.
Later there were no gardens. One day,
as if I had returned, not to my house,
but to the beginning of the Beginning, I reached a clarity.
Space made of air for the passionate games
of water and light. Diaphanous convergences:
from the twittering of green to the most humid blue
to the gray of embers to a woundlike pink
to an unburied gold. I heard a dark green murmur
burst from the center of the night: the neem tree.
On its shoulders, the sky
with all its barbarian jewels.
The heat was a huge closing hand,
one could hear the roots panting,
space expanding,
the crumbling of the year. The tree would not give way.
Huge as a monument to patience,
fair as the balance that weighs
a dewdrop,
a grain of light,
an instant.
Many moons fit in its branches.
House of squirrels, blackbird inn.
Strength is fidelity, power reverence:
no one ends at himself, each one is an all
in another all, in another one.
The other is contained in the one, the one is another:
we are constellations. The enormous neem
once knew how to be small. At its feet
I knew I was alive, I knew
that death is expansion, self-negation is growth.
I learned, in the brotherhood of the trees,
to reconcile myself, not with myself:
with what lifts me, sustains me, lets me fall.
I crossed paths with a girl. Her eyes:
the pact between the summer and the autumn suns.
She was a follower of acrobats, astronomers, camel drivers.
I of lighthouse keepers, logicians, saddhus. Our bodies
spoke, mingled, and went off.
We went off with them. It was the monsoon.
Skies of grass-bits and armed wind
at the crossroads. I named her Almendrita
after the girl of the story,
sailor of a stormy pond. Not a name:
an intrepid sailboat. It rained,
the earth dressed and became naked,
snakes left their holes,
the moon was made of water, the sun was water,
the sky took out its braids
and its braids were unraveled rivers,
the rivers swallowed villages,
death and life were jumbled,
dough of mud and sun,
season of lust and plague,
season of lightning on a sandalwood tree,
mutilated genital stars rotting,
reviving in your womb, mother India,
girl India,
drenched in semen, sap, poisons, juices.
Scales grew on the house. Almendrita:
flame intact through the snaking and the wind-gust,
in the night of the banana leaves, green ember,
hamadryad, yakshi:
laughter in the brambles,
bundle of brightness in the thicket, more music
than body, more bird-flight than music,
more woman than bird: your belly the sun,
sun in the water, sun-water in the earthen jar,
sunflower seed I planted in my chest,
agate ear of flame in the garden of bones.
For his funeral,
Chuang-tzu asked heaven for its lights,
the wind for its cymbals.
We asked the neem to marry us.
A garden is not a place: it is a passage,
a passion. We don’t know where we’re going,
to pass through is enough, to pass through is to remain:
a dizzying immobility. Seasons,
the waves of months. Each winter
a terrace above the year. Well-tempered light,
resonance, transparency, sculptures of air
dissolved as soon as they are said: syllables,
the fortunate isles! A sneak in the grass,
Demosthenes the cat is a luminous coal;
the female; Semiramis, chases ghosts, stalks
reflections, shadows, echoes. Above,
the sarcastic crows; the capercaillie and his mate,
exiled princes; the hoopoe,
crest and beak a fancy brooch;
the green artillery of the parakeets;
bats the color of nightfall.
On the fixed, empty, even sky,
a kite draws and erases circles.
Now, silent
on a wave’s arista:
an albatross, a cliff of foam.
Sudden scatter into wings.
We’re not far from Durban (where Pessoa studied).
We pass a tanker, heading for Mombassa,
that port with the name of a fruit. (In my blood:
Camoens, Vasco da Gama, and the rest . . .)
The garden has been left behind. Behind or ahead?
There are no more gardens than those we carry within.
What waits for us on the other bank?
Passion is passage: the other bank is here,
light in the bankless air, Prajnaparamita,
Our Lady of the Other Bank, you yourself,
the girl of the tale, alumna of the garden.
I forgot Nagarjuna and Dharmakirti in your breasts,
I found them in your cry, Maithuna,
two in one,
one in all, all in nothing,
sunyata,
the empty plenitude,
emptiness round as your hips!
Cormorants above
a rippling pool of light
fish for their shadows.
The vision scatters in a whirlwind,
