The Poems of Octavio Paz

by Octavio Paz

  against his shadow, always running behind himself, hurling, hurrying, and never reaching himself,

  condemned from childhood, alembic of time, king of himself, son of his own works.

  The last images fall headlong and the black river floods consciousness.

  Night bends over, the soul gives way, clusters of confused hours fall, man falls

  like a star, clusters of stars fall, like overripe fruit the world and its suns fall.

  But in my mind adolescence and its images keep watch, the only treasure not squandered:

  ships afire on seas still unnamed and each wave striking memory in a storm of memories

  (the fresh water in the island cisterns, the fresh water of the women and their voices sounding through the night like streams coming together,

  the goddess with green eyes and human words who planted her reasoning in our chest like a beautiful procession of lances,

  the calm reflection before a sphere, swollen with itself like an ear of wheat, but immortal, perfect, sufficient,

  the contemplation of numbers that entwine like musical notes or lovers,

  the universe like a lyre and a bow, the victorious geometry of the gods, the sole abode that is worthy of man)

  and the city with high walls that shines on the plain like a dying jewel

  and the demolished watchtowers and the defender destroyed and in the smoking chambers the royal treasure of women

  and the hero’s epitaph posted in the narrow pass like a sword

  and the poem that rises and with its wings covers the embrace of day and night

  and the tree of speech firmly planted in the plaza

  and justice in the open air of a people who weighs each act in the scale of a soul sensitive to the weight of light,

  acts, the tall pyres burnt by history!

  Under these black remains, truth, who raised these works, dozes: man is only man among men.

  And I reach down and grasp the incandescent grain and plant it in my being: one day it will grow.

  Delhi, 1952

  Is There No Way Out?

  Dozing I hear an incessant river running between dimly discerned, looming forms, drowsy and frowning.

  It is the black and white cataract, the voices, the laughter, the groans, of a confused world hurling itself from a height.

  And my thoughts that gallop and gallop and get no further also fall and rise,

  and turn back and plunge into the stagnant waters of language.

  A second ago it would have been easy to grasp a word and repeat it once and then again,

  any one of those phrases one utters alone in a room without mirrors

  to prove to oneself that it’s not certain,

  that we are still alive after all,

  but now with weightless hands night is lulling the furious tide,

  and one by one images recede, one by one words cover their faces.

  The time is past already for hoping for time’s arrival, the time of

  yesterday, today, and tomorrow,

  yesterday is today, tomorrow is today, today all is today, suddenly it came forth from itself and is watching me,

  it doesn’t come from the past, it is not going anywhere, today is here,

  it is not death—no one dies of death, everyone dies of life—,

  it is not life—instantaneous fruit, vertiginous and lucid rapture, the empty taste of death gives more life to life—,

  today is not death nor life,

  has no body, nor name, nor face, today is here,

  cast at my feet, looking at me.

  I am standing, quiet at the center of the circle I made in falling away from my thoughts,

  I am standing and I have nowhere to turn my eyes to, not one splintered fragment of the past is left,

  all childhood has brought itself to this instant and the whole future is these pieces of furniture nailed to their places,

  the wardrobe with its wooden face, the chairs lined up waiting for nobody,

  the chubby armchair with its arms spread, obscene as if dead in its bed,

  the electric fan—conceited insect—the lying window, the actual

  without chinks or cracks,

  all has shut itself up in itself, I have come back to where I began, everything is today and forever.

  Way off there, on the other side, shores extend, immense as a look of love,

  there the night clothed in water displays its hieroglyphs within hand’s reach,

  the river enters singing along the sleeping plain and moistens the roots of the word freedom,

  there enlaced bodies lose themselves in a forest of transparent trees,

  under the leaves of the sun we walk, we are two reflections that cross swords with each other,

  silver stretches bridges for us to cross the night, stones make way for us,

  there you are the tattooing on the jade breast fallen from the moon, there the insomniac diamond yields

  and in its empty center we are the eye that never blinks and the transfixion of the instant held within itself in its splendor.

  All is far off, there is no way back, the dead are not dead, the living are not alive,

  there is a wall, an eye that is a well, all that is pulls downwards,

  the body is heavy, thoughts are heavy, all the years are this minute that is dropping interminably down,

  from that hotel room in San Francisco I stepped right into Bangkok, today is yesterday, tomorrow is yesterday,

  reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don’t move, today is today, always is today,

  always the sound of trains that depart each night towards night,

  the resort to toothless words,

  the boring through of the wall, the comings and goings, reality shutting doors,

  putting in commas, the punctuation of time, all is far off; the walls are enormous,

  the glass of water is thousands of miles away, it will take me a thousand years to cross my room again,

  what a remote sound the word life has, I am not here, there is no here, this room is somewhere else,

  here is nowhere, little by little I have been shutting myself and I find no exit that doesn’t give onto this instant,

  this instant is I, I went out of myself all at once, I have no name and no face,

  I am here, cast at my feet, looking at myself looking to see myself seen.

  Outside, in the gardens that summer has ravaged, a cicada rages against the night.

  Am I or was I here?

  Tokyo, 1952

  [DL]

  The River

  The restless city circles in my blood like a bee.

  And the plane that traces a querulous moan in a long S, the trams that break down on remote corners,

  that tree weighted with affronts that someone shakes at midnight in the plaza,

  the noises that rise and shatter and those that fade away and whisper a secret that wriggles in the ear,

  they open the darkness, precipices of a’s and o’s, tunnels of taciturn vowels,

  galleries I run down blindfolded, the drowsy alphabet falls in the pit like a river of ink,

  and the city goes and comes and its stone body shatters as it arrives at my temple,

  all night, one by one, statue by statue, fountain by fountain, stone by stone, the whole night long

  its shards seek one another in my forehead, all night long the city talks in its sleep through my mouth,

  a gasping discourse, a stammering of waters and arguing stone, its story.

  To stop still an instant, to still my blood which goes and comes, goes and comes and says nothing,

  seated on top of me like a yogi in the shadow of a fig tree, like the Buddha on the river’s edge, to stop the inst
ant,

  a single instant, seated on the edge of time, to strike out my image of the river that talks in its sleep and says nothing and carries me with it,

  seated on the bank to stop the river, to unlock the instant, to penetrate its astonished rooms reaching the center of water,

  to drink at the inexhaustible fountain, to be the cascade of blue syllables falling from stone lips,

  seated on the edge of night like the Buddha on his self’s edge, to be the flicker of the lidded instant,

  the conflagration and the destruction and the birth of the instant, the breathing of night rushing enormous at the edge of time,

  to say what the river says, a long word resembling lips, a long word that never ends,

  to say what time says in hard sentences of stone, in vast gestures of sea covering worlds.

  In mid-poem a great helplessness overtakes me, everything abandons me,

  there is no one beside me, not even those eyes that gaze from behind me at what I write,

  no one behind or in front of me, the pen mutinies, there is neither beginning nor end nor even a wall to leap,

  the poem is a deserted esplanade, what’s said is not said, the unsaid is unsayable,

  towers, devastated terraces, Babylons, a sea of black salt, a blind

  kingdom, No,

  to stop myself; to keep quiet, to close my eyes until a green spike sprouts from my eyelids, a spurt of suns,

  and the alphabet wavers long under the wind of the vision and the tide rolls into one wave and the wave breaks the dike,

  to wait until the paper is covered with stars and the poem a forest of tangled words, No,

  I have nothing to say, no one has anything to say, nothing and nobody except the blood,

  nothing except this coming and going of the blood, this writing over the written, the repetition of the same word in mid-poem,

  syllables of time, broken letters, splotches of ink, blood that goes and comes and says nothing and carries me with it.

  And I speak, my beak bent over the paper and someone beside me writes while the blood goes and comes,

  and the city goes and comes through his blood, wants to say something, time wants to say something, the night wants to speak,

  all night long the man wants to say one single word, to speak his

  discourse at last, made up of moldered stones,

  and I whet my hearing, I want to hear what the man says, to repeat what the drifting city says,

  all night the broken stones seek one another, groping in my forehead, all night the water fights the stone,

  the words against the night, the night against the night, nothing lights up the opaque combat,

  the shock of arms does not wrench away a single gleam to the stone, one spark to the night, no one grants a respite,

  it is a fight to the death between immortals, No,

  to offer retreat, to stop the river of blood, the river of ink,

  to go back upstream, and that the night turn upon itself, display its bowels,

  and that the water show its heart, a cluster of drowned mirrors,

  may time thicken and its wound be an invisible scar, scarcely a delicate line upon the skin of the world,

  let the words lay down their arms and the poem be one single

  interwoven word,

  and may the soul be the blackened grass after fire, the lunar breast of a sea that’s turned to stone and reflects nothing

  except splayed dimension, expansion, space lying down upon itself; spread wings immense,

  and may everything be like flame that cuts itself into and freezes into the rock of diaphanous bowels,

  hard blazing resolved now in crystal, peaceable clarity.

  And the river goes back upstream, strikes its sails, picks up its images and coils within itself.

  Geneva, 1953

  [PB]

  The Broken Waterjar

  An interior gaze unfolds and a world of vertigo and flames is born under the skull of the dreamer:

  blue suns, green whirlwinds, beaks of light pecking open the stars like pomegranates,

  a solitary sunflower, golden eye turning at the center of a scorched esplanade,

  crystal forests of sound, forests of echoes and answers and waves, dialogue of transparencies,

  wind, the gallop of water between the endless walls of a throat of coal,

  horse, comet, skyrocket nailed exactly in the heart of night, feathers, fountains,

  feathers, a sudden flowering of torches, candles, wings, an invasion of whiteness,

  island birds singing under the dreamer’s skull!

  I opened my eyes, looked up at the sky, and saw how the night was covered with stars:

  living islands, bracelets of flaming islands, stones burning and

  breathing, clusters of living stones,

  what fountain, what clarities, what hair loose on a dark back,

  what river up there, and that far-off sound of water next to fire, of light against shadow!

  Harps, gardens of harps.

  But at my side there was no one.

  Only the plain: cacti, huizaches, huge rocks exploding under the sun.

  No crickets sang,

  there was a vague smell of lime and burnt seeds,

  the village streets were dry creeks,

  and the air would have smashed into a thousand pieces if someone had shouted: Who’s there?

  Barren hills, cold volcano, stone gasping in such splendor, drought, the taste of dust,

  the rustle of bare feet in the dust, and a pirúl tree in the middle of the plain like a petrified fountain!

  Tell me, drought, tell me, burnt land, land of ground bones, tell me, dying moon:

  is there no water,

  is there only blood, is there only dust, only the steps of bare feet on thorns,

  only rags and food for insects and stupor under a godless noon like a cacique of gold?

  Are there no horses neighing on the riverbank among the round and shimmering boulders,

  in the still water, under the green light of the leaves and the shouts of the men and the women bathing at dawn?

  The corn-god, the flower-god, the water-god, the blood-god, the Virgin—

  have they all died, have they all gone, broken waterjars next to a blocked well?

  Is only the toad alive?

  Does only the dull green toad glitter and shine through the night in Mexico?

  Is only the fat cacique of Cempoala immortal?

  Reclining under the sacred tree of jade that is watered with blood, while two young slaves fan him,

  leading the great public processions, leaning on the cross: weapon and walking stick,

  in battle dress, the carved flint face sniffing the smoke of the firing squads like a rare incense,

  the weekends in his protected house by the sea with his mistress and her neon jewels—

  is only the toad immortal?

  Here is cold green rage and its tail of razors and shards of glass,

  here is the dog and its mangy howl,

  the sullen maguey, the bristling nopal and the candelabra cactus, the flower that bleeds and lets blood,

  the flower of inexorable and jagged geometry like a delicate

  instrument of torture,

  here is the night of long teeth and the sharpened gaze, the night that skins with a flint knife,

  listen to the teeth crunching,

  listen to the bones crushing bones,

  the drum of human skin beaten with a femur,

  the drum of the breast beaten with an angry heel,

  the tom-tom of the eardrums beaten by the delirious sun,

  here is the dust that rises like a yellow king and obliterates everything and dances alone and collapses,
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  like a tree whose roots have suddenly dried up, like a tower that topples at the first blow,

  here is the man who falls and rises and eats dust and drags along,

  the human insect who drills through the rock and drills through the centuries and eats away at the light,

  here is the broken rock, the broken man, the broken light.

  Open our eyes or close them—is it all the same?

  Interior castles that thoughts burn down so that another may rise, purer, glittering, flaming,

  the seed of an image that grows into a tree and shatters the skull,

  a word seeking the lips that will speak it,

  huge stones have fallen on the ancient human fountain,

  there are centuries of stones, years of slabs, thick minutes piled on the human fountain.

  Tell me, drought, stone polished by toothless time, by toothless hunger,

  dust ground by teeth that are centuries, by centuries that are hungers,

  tell me, broken waterjar in the dust, tell me,

  is the light born to strike bone against bone, man against man, hunger against hunger,

  till the spark, the cry, the word bursts out,

  till the water gushes and the tree with wide turquoise leaves grows at last?

  We must sleep with eyes open, we must dream with our hands,

  we must dream the active dreams of a river seeking its course, the dreams of the sun dreaming its worlds,

  we must dream out loud, we must sing until the song sends out roots, trunk, branches, birds, stars,

  sing until the dream begets and the red wheat of the resurrection is created from the rib of the sleeper,

  the water of woman, the spring where we drink and look at ourselves and recognize ourselves and recover ourselves,

  the spring for understanding that we are men, the water that speaks to itself in the night and calls us by our name,

  the spring of words for saying I, you, he, we, under the great tree,

  living statue of the rain,

  for saying the beautiful pronouns and recognizing ourselves and being loyal to our names,

  we must dream backwards, toward the fountain, we must row against the centuries,

  beyond childhood, beyond the beginning, beyond the waters of baptism,