by Octavio Paz
the green music of elytra
in the fig tree’s pristine night;
—there, inside, fingertips are eyes,
to touch is to see, glances touch,
eyes hear smells;
—there, inside is outside,
it is everywhere and nowhere,
things are themselves and others,
imprisoned in an icosahedron
there is a music weaver beetle
and another insect unweaving
the syllogisms the spider weaves,
hanging from the threads of the moon;
—there, inside, space
is an open hand, a mind
that thinks shapes, not ideas,
shapes that breathe, walk, speak, transform
and silently evaporate;
—there, inside, land of woven echoes,
a slow cascade of light drops
between the lips of the crannies:
light is water; water, diaphanous time
where eyes wash their images;
—there, inside, cables of desire
mimic the eternities of a second
the mind’s electric current
turns on, turns off, turns on,
flaming resurrections
of a charred alphabet;
—there is no school there, inside,
it is always the same day, the same night always,
time has not yet been invented,
the sun has not grown old,
this snow is the same as grass,
always and never the same,
it has never rained, it always rains,
everything is being, and has never been,
a nameless people of sensations,
names that search for a body,
pitiless transparencies, cages of clarity
where identity cancels itself in its likenesses,
difference in its contradictions.
The fig tree, its lies and its wisdom:
wonders of the earth
—trustworthy, punctual, redundant—
and the conversations with ghosts.
An apprenticeship with the fig tree:
talking with the living and the dead.
And with myself.
The year’s procession:
changes that are repetitions.
The way and the weight of time.
Dawn: more than light,
a vapor of clarity
changed into gravid drops
on the windowpanes and on the leaves:
the world grows thin in these vibrating geometries
until it becomes the edge of a reflection.
The day buds, breaking out among the leaves,
spinning over itself,
surging, again incarnate,
from the vacuum into which it falls.
Time is filtered light.
The black fruit bursts
in the flesh-colored blossoms,
the broken branch leaks sour, milky sap.
The fig tree’s metamorphosis:
burnt by autumn, transfigured by autumn’s light.
It rises through diaphanous spaces,
a bare black virgin.
The sky is a revolving lapis lazuli:
its continents wheel au ralenti,
geographies without substance.
Flames in the snow of the clouds.
The afternoon turns to burnt honey.
Silent landslide of horizons:
light falls from the peaks,
shadow overflows the plain.
By the light of a lamp—night now
mistress of the house,
and the ghost of my grandfather
now master of the night—
I would penetrate silence,
bodiless body, time
without hours. Each night books,
transparent fever machines,
raised within me
architectures built above an abyss.
A breath of the spirit creates them,
a blink of the eye tears them down.
I gathered wood with the others,
and wept from the smoke
of the horse-tamer’s pyre;
I wandered on the floating grove
the turbulent green Tagus dragged along:
the liquid thicket curling
behind the fleeing Galatea;
I saw, like bunches of grapes, the shades clustered
to drink the blood in the pit:
better to live as a peasant,
breaking clods of dirt for a dog’s ration,
than to rule this pale nation of the dead;
I was thirsty, I saw demons in the Gobi;
I swam in the grotto with the siren
(and later, in the cathartic dream,
fendendo i drappi, e mostravami ’l ventre,
quel mi svegliò col puzzo che n’uscia);
I engraved on my imaginary tomb:
Do not move this stone
My only riches are bones:
those memorable freckled pears
found in Villaurrutia’s basket of words;
Carlos Garrote, eternal half-brother,
God save you, he cried, as he knocked me down,
and it was, in the mirrors of recurrent insomnia,
I myself who had wounded me;
Isis and Lucius the ass; Nemo and the squid;
and the books marked with the arms of Priapus,
read on diluvial afternoons,
body tense, eyes intent.
Names anchored in the bay
of my forehead: I write because the druid,
under the murmuring syllables of the hymn,
ilex planted deeply on the page,
gave me the branch of mistletoe, the spell
that makes words flow from stone.
Names accumulate their images,
images their vaporous
conjectural confederations.
Clouds and clouds, a phantom gallop
of clouds over the peaks
of my memory. Adolescence,
land of clouds.
The big house,
stranded in clogged time.
The plaza, the great trees
where the sun nestled,
the tiny church: its belfry
only reached their knees,
but its double tongue of metal
woke the dead.
Under the arcade, in military sheaves,
the cane, green lances,
sugar rifles;
at the portal, the magenta stall:
the coolness of water kept in the shade,
the ancestral palm-mats, knotted light,
and on the zinc counter
the miniature planets
fallen from the meridian tree,
sloes and mandarins,
yellow heaps of sweetness.
The years turn in the plaza,
a catherine wheel,
and do not move.
My words,
speaking of the house, split apart.
Rooms and rooms inhabited
only by their ghosts,
only by the rancor of the elderly
inhabited. Families,
breeding-grounds for scorpions:
as they give ground glass to dogs
with their pittance, so they nourish us with their hates
and the dubious ambition of being someone.
They also gave me bread, gave me time,
open spaces in the corner
s of the days,
backwaters to be alone with myself.
Child among taciturn adults
and their terrifying childishness,
child in passageways with tall doors,
rooms with portraits,
dim brotherhoods of the departed,
child survivor
of mirrors with no memory
and their people of wind:
time and its incarnations
broken into travesties of reflections.
In my house there were more dead than living.
My mother, a thousand-year-old girl,
mother of the world, my orphan,
self-sacrificing, ferocious, stubborn, provident,
titmouse, bitch, ant, wild boar,
love letter with spelling mistakes;
my mother: bread I’d slice
with her own knife each day.
Under the rain,
the ash trees taught me patience,
to sing facing the violent wind.
A virgin who talked in her sleep, my aunt
taught me to see with eyes closed,
to see within, and through the wall;
my grandfather, to smile at defeat,
and for disasters: in affliction, conviction.
(This that I say is earth thrown over
your name: let it rest softly.)
Between vomit and thirst,
strapped to the rack of alcohol,
my father came and went through flames.
One evening of flies and dust,
we gathered, among the rails and crossties
of a railway station, his remains.
I could never talk to him.
I meet him now in dreams,
that blurred country of the dead.
We always speak of other things.
As the house crumbled, I grew.
I was (I am) grass,
weeds in anonymous trash.
Days,
like a free mind, an open book.
I was not multiplied by the envious mirrors
that turn men into things, things into numbers:
neither power nor gain. Nor sanctity either:
heaven for me soon became an uninhabited piece of sky,
an adorable and hollow beauty.
Sufficient and changing presence:
time and its epiphanies.
God did not talk to me from the clouds;
from the leaves of the fig tree
my body spoke to me, the bodies of my body.
Instantaneous incarnations:
afternoon washed by rain,
light just coming out from the water,
the feminine mist of plants,
skin stuck to my skin: succubus!
—as if time at last were to coincide
with itself, and I with it,
as if time and its two times
were one single time
that still was not time, a time
where always is now and anytime always,
as if I and my double were one
and I was no longer.
Pomegranate of the hour: I drank sun, I ate time.
Fingers of light would part the foliage.
Bees humming in my blood:
the white advent.
The shot flung me
to the loneliest shore. I was a stranger
in the vast ruins of the afternoon.
Abstract vertigo: I talked with myself,
I was double, time split apart.
Amazed at the moment’s peak,
flesh became word—and the word fell.
To know exile on the earth, being earth,
is to know mortality. An open secret,
an empty secret with nothing inside:
there are no dead, there is only death, our mother.
The Aztecs knew it, the Greeks divined it:
water is fire, and in its passage
we are only flashes of flame.
Death is the mother of forms . . .
Sound, the blindman’s cane of sense:
I write death and for a moment
I live within it. I inhabit its sound:
a pneumatic cube of glass,
vibrating on this page,
vanishing among its echoes.
Landscapes of words:
my eyes, reading, depopulate them.
It doesn’t matter: my ears propagate them.
They breed there, in the indecisive
zones of language, the villages in the marsh.
They are amphibious creatures, they are words.
They pass from one element to another,
they bathe in fire, rest in the air.
They are from the other side.
I don’t hear them: what do they say?
They don’t say: they talk and talk.
I leap from one story to another on a
suspension bridge of eleven syllables.
A body, living but intangible, the air
in all places always and in none.
It sleeps with open eyes,
it lies down in the grass and wakes up as dew,
it chases itself, talks to itself in tunnels,
is a bit that drills into mountains,
a swimmer in the rough seas of fire,
an invisible fountain of laments,
it lifts two oceans with a hand,
and walks through the streets, lost,
a word in limbo, in search of meaning,
air that vanishes into air.
And why do I say all this?
To say that, at high noon,
the air was populated with phantoms,
sun coined into wings,
weightless change, butterflies.
Night fell. On the terrace
the silenciary moon officiated.
A death’s-head, messenger
of the souls, the enchanting
enchanted by the camelias
and the electric light, was,
over our heads, a fluttering
of opaque conjurations. Kill it!
the woman shouted
and burned it like a witch.
Then, with a fierce sigh, they crossed themselves.
Scattered light, Psyche . . .
Are there messengers? Yes,
space is a body tattooed with signs, the air
an invisible web of calls and answers.
Animals and things make languages,
through us the universe talks with itself.
We are a fragment—
accomplished in our unaccomplishment—
of its discourse. A coherent
and empty solipsism:
since the beginning of the beginning
what does it say? It says that it says us.
It says it to itself. Oh madness of discourse,
that cause sets up with and against itself!
From the moment’s peak flung down
into an afternoon of sexual plants,
death discovered me.
And in death I discovered language.
The universe talks to itself,
but people talk to people:
there is history. Guillermo, Alfonso, Emilio:
the patio where we played was history,
it was history to play at death together.
The clouds of dust, the shouts, the tumbles:
gabble, not speech.
In the aimless give-and-take of things,
carried along by the revolutions of forms and times,
; everyone battles with the others,
everyone rebels, blindly, against himself.
Thus, returning to their origin,
they pay for their injustice. (Anaximander)
The injustice of being: things suffer
one with the other and with themselves
for to be is the desire to be more,
to always be more than more.
To be time is the sentence; history, our punishment.
But it is also the proving-ground:
to see, in the blot of blood
on Veronica’s veil, the face
of another—always the other is our victim.
Tunnels, galleries of history:
is death the only exit?
The way out, perhaps, is toward within.
The purgation of language, history consuming itself
in the dissolution of pronouns:
not I am nor I even more so
but more being without I.
In the center of time, there is no more time,
but motion become fixity, a circle
canceled by its revolutions.
Noon:
the trees in the patio are green flames.
The crackling of the last embers
in the grass: stubborn insects.
Over the yellow meadows,
clarities: the glass footsteps of autumn.
A fortuitous meeting of reflections,
an ephemeral bird
enters the foliage of these letters.
The sun, in my writing, drinks the shadows.
Between the walls—not of stone,
but raised by memory—
a transitory grove:
reflective light among the trunks
and the breathing of the wind.
The bodiless god, the nameless god
whom we call by empty
names—by the names of the emptiness—
the god of time, the god that is time,
passes through the branches
that I write. Dispersion of clouds
above a neutral mirror:
in the dissipation of the images,
the soul already is, vacant, pure space.
Motion resolves in tranquility.
The sun insists, fastened
in the corolla of the absorbed hour.
Flame on the water-stalk
of the words that say it,
the flower is another sun.
Tranquility dissolves in itself. Time
elapses without elapse. It passes and stays.
Perhaps although we all pass, it neither passes nor stays:
there is a third state.
There is a third state:
being without being, empty plenitude,
hour without hours and the other names
with which it appears and vanishes
in the confluences of language.
Not the presence: its presentiment.
