by Octavio Paz
two birds have made a nest:
Adam, sun, and Eve, moon.
9.
Boy and top
Each time he throws it,
it lands, exactly
in the center of the world.
10.
Objects
They live beside us.
We don’t know them, they don’t know us.
Sometimes they talk with us.
In Uxmal
1.
The stone of the days
The sun is time;
time, a sun of stone;
the stone, blood.
2.
Noon
The light doesn’t blink,
time empties out its minutes,
a bird has stopped dead in the air.
3.
Later
The light crashes,
the columns awake and,
without moving, dance.
4.
Full sun
The hour is transparent:
if the bird is invisible,
see the color of its song.
5.
Reliefs
The rain, long hair and dancing foot,
ankle bitten by lightning,
comes down accompanied by drums:
corn opens its eyes and grows.
6.
Snake carved on a wall
In the sun the wall breathes, throbs, undulates,
a living and tattooed piece of the sky;
man drinks sun and is water, earth.
And above so much life the snake
with a head between its jaws:
gods drink blood, they eat men.
Loose Stones
1.
Flower
The shriek, the beak, the tooth, the howling,
the flesh-eating nothingness and its racket,
all vanish before this plain flower.
2.
Lady
Each night she goes down to the well
and in the morning reappears
with a new reptile in her arms.
3.
Biography
Not what he could have been
but what he was.
And what he was is dead.
4.
Bells in the night
Waves of shadow
drench my thoughts—
but do not put them out.
5.
At the door
Voices, words, laughter.
I paused, hanging:
up there, the moon, alone.
6.
Vision
Closing my eyes I see myself:
space, space
where I am and where I’m not.
7.
Dissonance
The busy insects,
the horses the color of the sun,
the mules the color of clouds,
the clouds, enormous weightless boulders,
the mountains like tilting skies,
the flock of trees drinking from a stream,
they are all here, joyous in their being,
before us, we who are not here,
eaten by rage, by hate,
by love eaten, by death.
8.
Illiterate
I raised my face to the sky,
that immense stone of eroded letters,
and nothing was revealed to me by the stars.
from The Violent Season [1948–1957]
Hymn Among the Ruins
where foaming the Sicilian sea . . .
Góngora
Crowned with itself, the day displays its plumage.
A shout high and yellow,
a hot fountain in the center of a sky
impartial and beneficent!
Appearances are beautiful in this their momentary truth.
The sea mounting the coast
clings between the rocks, a dazzling spider;
the livid wound on the mountain glitters;
a handful of goats are a flock of stones,
the sun lays its golden egg and spills out over the sea.
All is god.
A broken statue,
columns eaten by the light,
ruins alive in a world of living dead!
Night falls on Teotihuacán.
At the top of the pyramid the boys smoke marijuana,
harsh guitars sound.
What grass, what living water of life can give us life,
where can the word be unearthed,
the proportion that governs hymn and speech,
the dance, the city and the measuring scales?
Mexican song explodes in a curse,
a colored star that goes dark,
a stone that blocks the doors of contact.
The earth tastes of rotten earth.
Eyes see, hands touch.
Here a few things are enough:
prickly pear, a coral and thorny planet,
the hooded figs,
grapes that taste of resurrection,
and clams, stubborn maidenheads,
salt, cheese, wine, bread of the sun.
From the heights of her darkness an island girl looks at me,
a thin cathedral dressed in light.
Towers of salt, against the shore’s green pines,
the white sails of boats arise.
The light builds temples on the sea.
New York, London, Moscow.
Shadow covers the plain with its phantom ivy,
swaying and shivering vegetation,
its mousey fur, its swarm of rats.
Now and then an anemic sun trembles.
Reclining on hills that yesterday were cities, Polyphemus yawns.
Down there, in the pits, a herd of men drag along.
(Domesticated bipeds, their flesh—
recent religious restrictions notwithstanding—
is much favored by the wealthy.
Until recently the common people considered them unclean.)
To see, to touch each day’s lovely forms.
The buzzing of light, darts and wings.
The wine-stain on the tablecloth smells of blood.
Like coral branches in the water
I stretch my senses into the living hour:
the moment is complete in a yellow harmony.
Noon, ear of wheat heavy with minutes,
the cup of eternity!
My thoughts split, meander, entwine,
start again,
and finally are immobile, endless rivers,
delta of blood beneath a sun without twilight.
Must it all end in this spatter of stagnant water?
Day, round day,
shining orange with twenty-four sections,
all saturated with one single yellow sweetness!
The mind finally takes flesh in forms,
the two enemy halves become one
and the conscience-mirror liquefies,
and is a fountain again, a wellspring of legends:
Man, tree of images,
words that are flowers that are fruits that are deeds.
Naples, 1948
Masks of Dawn
for José Bianco
Over the chessboard of the piazza
the last stars linger on their way.
Castles of light and shimmering thin bishops
surround these spectral monarchies.
The empty game, yesterday’s war of angels!
Brilliance of stagnant water whereon float
a few smal
l joys, already green,
the rotten apple of desire,
a face nibbled in places by the moon,
the wrinkled minute of an eagerness,
everything life itself has not consumed,
leavings of the orgy of impatience.
The man in his death-struggle, open his eyes.
That splinter of light that through the curtains spies
on the one expiating among the death-rattles
is the look which does not look but looks,
the eye in whom the images form and shine
before they are scattered, and the glassy
precipice, and the grave of diamond:
this is the mirror that devours mirrors.
Olivia, blue-eyed lightly-touching woman,
white hands between the greenness of the cords,
the harp of crystal of the waterfall,
she swims against the current to the shore
of waking: the bed, the heap of clothes,
the hydrographic stains upon the wall,
that nameless body who beside her lies
chewing on prophecies and mutterings
and the abomination of the flat ceiling.
Reality gaping among its trifles
repeating itself in disemboweled horrors.
The prisoner of his imagining
weaves and unravels his weaving sightlessly,
scrapes at his scars, plays games
with the letters of his name, scatters them,
and then they insist on the same havoc,
set in the setting of his corroded name.
He goes from himself toward himself, he turns,
in the center of himself he stops and shouts
Who’s there? and the fountain of his questioning
opens its amazed flower, glistens,
its stalk hisses, it bends its head,
and finally, in its dizziness collapses,
shattered like the sword against the wall.
A young girl, tamer of the lightning bolt,
and the woman slipping away along under
the glittering fine edge of the guillotine;
the gentleman who from the moon descends
with a sweet-smelling branch of epitaphs;
the frigid sleepless woman sharpening
the worn out flint-stone of her sex;
the man of purity, within whose forehead
the golden eagle makes his nest,
the monomaniac hunger of obsession;
the tree that has eight interlocked branches
struck by the bolt of love, set on fire
and burned to ash in transitory beds;
the man buried in life among his grief;
the young dead woman who prostitutes herself
and goes back to her grave at the first cock;
the victim searching out his murderer;
he who has lost his body, and he his shadow,
he who escapes himself and he who hunts himself,
who pursues himself and never finds himself, all those,
the living corpses on the edge of the moment,
wait suspended. Time itself in doubt,
day hesitates. Moving in dream,
upon her bed of mire and water, Venice
opens her eyes and remembers: canopies,
and a high soaring that has turned to stone!
Splendor flooded over . . .
The bronze horses of San Marco
pass wavering architecture,
go down in their green darkness to the water
and throw themselves in the sea, toward Byzantium.
Volumes of stupor and stone, back and forth
in this hour among the few alive . . .
But the light advances in great strides,
shattering yawns and agonies.
Exultance, radiances that tear apart!
Dawn throws its first knife
Venice, 1948
[MR]
Mutra
Like a mother who loves too much, a terrible, suffocating mother,
like a sullen, solar lioness,
like a single wave the size of the sea,
it has arrived silently and in each of us sits like a king
and the glass days melt and a throne of thorns and embers is raised in every breast
and its kingdom is a solemn hiccup, a flattened breath of gods and animals with dilated eyes
and mouths full of hot insects pronouncing the same syllable day and night, day and night.
Summer, enormous mouth, vowel made of steam and gasping.
This day, wounded to death, that drags along the length of time and never stops dying,
and the next day, impatiently scratching at the undefined land of dawn,
and the others who await their hour in the vast stables of the year,
this day and its four cubs, the morning with its crystal tail and noon with its one eye,
noon absorbed in its own light, seated in its splendor,
the afternoon rich in birds and the night with its stars armed in full regalia,
this day and the presences that the sun lifts or pulls down with a flap of the wings:
the girl who appears in the square and is a stream of unhurried coolness,
the beggar who raises himself up like a thin prayer, a heap of garbage and nasal canticles,
the red bougainvillea blackened to the color of flesh, purple from so much blue,
the women laborers who carry a stone on their heads as if they were carrying an extinguished sun,
the beauty in her cave of stalactites and the sound of her scorpion bracelets,
the man covered with ashes who worships the phallus, dung and water,
the musicians who pull sparks from daybreak and bring the graceful storm of the dance down to earth,
the necklace of flashes, the electric garlands balanced in the middle of the night,
the sleepless children picking fleas by the light of the moon,
the fathers and mothers with their family flocks and their animals asleep and their gods turned to stone a thousand years ago,
the butterflies, the vultures, the snakes, the monkeys, the cows, the insects that look like madness,
all this long day with its terrible freight of beings and things, slowly runs aground on unmoving time.
We all are falling with the day, we all enter the tunnel,
we cross endless corridors whose walls of solid air close in,
we imprison ourselves in ourselves and at each step the human animal gasps and collapses,
we retreat, we go backwards, the animal loses its future with every step,
and the erect and the hard and the bony within us finally give way, heavily falling into the mother mouth.
Inside my self I crowd myself, packed together in my self until I spill out,
I am the outstretched, spreading out, the over-stuffed, spilling over and filling up,
there is no vertigo nor mirror nor nausea facing the mirror, there is no fall,
only a being, an overflowing being, full to the brim, all adrift:
not like the bow that arches and bends over itself to let the arrow fly straight to the mark, not like the chest that awaits it, and for whom hope already draws the wound,
not concentrated nor in trance, but stumbling, step by step, spilled water, we return to the origin.
And our head falls on our chest and our body falls on our body without finding its end, its final body.
No, take hold of the ancient image: anchor existence and plant it in the stone, base of the lightning.
There are stones that never give way, stones made of time, ti
me made of stone, centuries that are columns,
assemblies singing hymns of stone,
fountains of jade, obsidian gardens, towers of marble, tall beauty armed against time.
One day my hand brushed against all that constructed glory.
But stones also lose their footing, stones too are images,
and they fall and they scatter and mix and flow with the unceasing river.
The stones too are the river.
Where is the man who gives life to the stones of the dead, the man who makes the stones and the dead speak?
Foundations of stone and of music,
the factory of mirrors of speech and poetry’s castle of fire
entwine their roots in his chest, rest in his head; his own hand sustains them.
Under the breastplate of rock-crystal I searched for the man, groped for the imperceptible opening;
we are born and the tear is no more than a scratch and it never scars over and it burns and it is a star giving off its own light,
the little wound never fades, the sign of the blood is never erased, through that door we go into the dark.
Man also flows, man also falls and is an image that vanishes.
Marshes of lethargy, accumulations of algae, waterfalls of bees over eyes badly closed,
banquet of sand, chewed hours, chewed images,
life chewed for centuries until it is nothing but an ecstatic chaos that floats on the sleeping waters,
water of eyes, water of mouths, nuptial waters, self-absorbed, incestuous
water, water of the gods, copulation of the gods,
water of stars and reptiles, water forests of burnt bodies,
the beatitude of fullness, overflowing itself, we are not, I don’t want to be God, I don’t want to stagger forward, I don’t want to go back, I am a man
and man is man, he who leapt into the void and since then nothing has sustained him but his own flight,
the one detached from his mother, the exiled, rootless, with neither heaven nor earth, but with a bridge, an arch
stretched over nothing, in himself gathered, made into a bundle, and nevertheless split in two from the moment of birth, fighting