by Octavio Paz
1.
Sun throughout the day Cold throughout the sun
Nobody on the streets parked cars
Still no snow but wind wind
A red tree still burns
in the chilled air
Talking to it I talk to you
2.
I am in a room abandoned by language
You are in another identical room
Or we both are
on a street your glance has depopulated
The world
imperceptibly comes apart Memory
decayed beneath our feet
I am stopped in the middle of this
unwritten line
3.
Doors open and close by themselves Air
enters and leaves our house Air
talks to itself talking to you Air
nameless in the endless corridor
Who knows who is on the other side? Air
turns and turns in my empty skull Air
turns to air everything it touches Air
with air-fingers scatters everything I say
I am the air you don’t see
I can’t open your eyes I can’t close the door
The air has turned solid
4.
This hour has the shape of a pause
This pause has your shape
You have the shape of a fountain made
not of water but of time
My pieces bob
at the jet’s tip
what I was am still am not
My life is weightless The past thins out
The future a little water in your eyes
5.
Now you have a bridge-shape
Our room navigates beneath your arches
From your railing we watch us pass
You ripple with wind more light than body
The sun on the other bank grows upside down
Its roots buried deep in the sky
We could hide ourselves in its foliage
Build a bonfire with its branches
The day is habitable
6.
The cold has immobilized the world
Space is made of glass Glass made of air
The lightest sounds build
quick sculptures
Echoes multiply and scatter them
Maybe it will snow
The burning tree quivers
surrounded now by night
Talking to it I talk to you
Objects and Apparitions
for Joseph Cornell
Hexahedrons of wood and glass,
scarcely bigger than a shoebox,
with room in them for night and all its lights.
Monuments to every moment,
refuse of every moment, used:
cages for infinity.
Marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice,
pins, stamps, and glass beads:
tales of the time.
Memory weaves, unweaves the echoes:
in the four corners of the box
shadowless ladies play at hide-and-seek.
Fire buried in the mirror,
water sleeping in the agate:
solos of Jenny Colonne and Jenny Lind.
“One has to commit a painting,” said Degas,
“the way one commits a crime.” But you constructed
boxes where things hurry away from their names.
Slot machine of visions,
condensation flask for conversations,
hotel of crickets and constellations.
Minimal, incoherent fragments:
the opposite of History, creator of ruins,
out of your ruins you have made creations.
Theater of the spirits:
objects putting the laws
of identity through hoops.
“Grand Hotel de la Couronne”: in a vial,
the three of clubs and, very surprised,
Thumbelina in gardens of reflection.
A comb is a harp strummed by the glance
of a little girl
born dumb.
The reflector of the inner eye
scatters the spectacle:
God all alone above an extinct world.
The apparitions are manifest,
their bodies weigh less than light,
lasting as long as this phrase lasts.
Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes
my words became visible for a moment.
[EB]
Return
for José Alvarado
It’s better not to go back to the village,
the subverted paradise silent
in the shatter of shrapnel.
Ramón López Velarde
Voices at the corner’s turn voices
through the sun’s spread hand almost liquid
shadow and light The carpenter whistles
the iceman whistles three ash trees
whistling in the plaza The invisible
foliage of sounds growing
rising up Time
stretched to dry on the rooftops
I am in Mixcoac Letters rot
in the mailboxes The bougainvillea
against the wall’s white lime flattened by the sun
a stain a purple passionate calligraphy
written by the sun
I am walking back back to what I left
or to what left me Memory
edge of the cliff balcony
over the void I walk and do not move forward
I am surrounded by city I need air
need a body need
the stone that is pillow and slab
the grass that is cloud and water
Spirit flickers Noon
pounding fist of light
To collapse in an office or onto the pavement
to end up in a hospital the pain of dying like that
isn’t worth the pain I look back
that passerby nothing now but mist
Germination of nightmares
infestation of leprous images
in the belly brains lungs
in the genitals of the college and the temple
in the movie houses the phantom populations of desire
in the meeting-places of here and there
this and that in the looms of language
in memory and its mansions
teeming clawed tusked ideas
swarms of reasons shaped like knives
in the catacombs in the plaza
in the hermit’s well
in the bed of mirrors and in the bed of razors
in the sleepwalking sewers
in the objects in the store window
seated on their throne of glances
The vegetation of disaster
ripens beneath the ground They are burning
millions and millions of old notes
in the Bank of Mexico On corners and in plazas
on the wide pedestals of the public squares
the Fathers of the Civic Church
a silent conclave of puppet buffoons
neither eagles nor jaguars buzzard lawyers
locusts wings of ink sawing mandibles
ventriloquist coyotes peddlers of shadows
beneficent satraps the cacomistle thief of hens
the monument to the Rattle and its snake
the altar to the Mauser and the machete
the mausoleum of the epauletted cayman
rhetoric sculpted in phrases of cement
Paralytic architectur
e silenced neighborhoods
rotting municipal gardens mounds of saltpeter
deserted lots camps of urban nomads
ant-nests worm-farms cities of the city
thoroughfares of scars alleys of living flesh
the Funeral Parlor by the window display of coffins
whores pillars of vain night
At dawn
in the drifting bar the enormous mirror thaws
the solitary drinkers
contemplate the dissolution of their faces
The sun rises from its bed of bones
The air is not air it strangles without arms or hands
Dawn rips the curtains City
heap of broken words
Wind
on the dusty corners turns the papers
Yesterday’s news more remote
than a cuneiform tablet smashed to bits
Cracked scriptures languages in pieces
the signs were broken
was split
atl tlachinolli
burnt water
There is no center
plaza of congregation and consecration
there is no axis the years dispersed
horizons disbanded They have branded the city
on every door on every forehead
the $ sign
We are surrounded I have gone back to where I began
Did I win or lose? (You ask
what laws rule “success” and “failure”?
The songs of the fishermen float up
from the unmoving riverbank Wang Wei to the Prefect Chang
from his cabin on the lake But I don’t want
an intellectual hermitage
in San Ángel or Coyoacán) All is gain
if all is lost I walk toward myself
toward the plaza Space is within
it is not a subverted paradise it is a pulse-beat of time
Places are confluences flutters of beings
in an instantaneous space Wind whistles
in the ash trees fountains
almost liquid light and shadow voices of water
shine flow are lost a bundle of reflections
left in my hands I walk without moving forward
We never arrive Never reach where we are
Not the past the present is untouchable
In the Middle of This Phrase . . .
I am not at the top of the world. The moment
is not the stylite’s pillar, time
doesn’t rise from my feet, doesn’t burst
in my skull with a silent black explosion,
an illumination identical to blindness.
I am on the sixth floor, I am
in a cage dangling from time.
Sixth floor: clatter and surf,
battle of metals, glass shatter,
engines with a human rage. The night
is a disjointed murmur, a body
caressing itself, tearing itself apart. Blind,
clumsily soldering its pieces, it collects
its broken names and scatters them.
With lopped fingers
the city touches itself in dreams.
I am not at a crossroads: to choose
is to go wrong. I am
in the middle of this phrase. Where will it take me?
Rumbling tumble, data and date,
my birthfall: a calendar dismembered
in the hollows of my memory.
I am the sack and bones of my shadows.
A slope
to the slack breasts of my mother.
Wrinkled hills, swabbed lava,
sobbing fields, saltpeter meals.
Two workmen open the pit. Crumbled
mouth of cement and brick.
The wracked box appears: through the loose planks
the pearl-gray hat, the pair of shoes,
the lawyer’s black suit. Bones, buttons, rags:
sudden heap of dust at the feet of the light.
Cold, unused light, almost sleeping,
dawn light, just down from the hills,
shepherdess of the dead. That which was my father
fits in that canvas sack a workman hands me
as my mother crosses herself. The vision dissolves
before it ends: I am in the middle,
dangling in a cage, dangling in an image.
The beginning drifts off, the end vanishes.
There is neither start nor finish: I am in the pause,
I neither end nor begin, what I say
has neither hands nor feet. I turn around within myself
and always find the same names,
the same faces, and never find myself.
My history is not mine: a syllable from that broken phrase
the city in its circular fever repeats and repeats.
City, my city, scorned stela,
dishonored stone, name spat out.
Your story is History: fate
masked as freedom, errant,
orbitless star, a game
we all play without knowing the rules,
a game that no one wins, a game without rules,
the whim of a speculative god, a man
turned into a stuttering god. Our oracles
are aphasic, our prophets
seers with glasses. History:
a coming and going with no beginning and no end.
No one has gone there, no one
has drunk from the fountain, no one
has opened the stone eyelids of time, no one
has heard the first word no one will hear the last,
the mouth that speaks it talks only to itself, no one
has gone down to the pit of the universes, no one
has returned from the dungheap of the suns. History:
garbage dump and rainbow. Scale
to the high terraces: seven notes
dissolved in clarity. Shadowless words.
We didn’t hear them, we denied them, we said they don’t exist:
we were content with noise. Sixth floor:
I am in the middle of this phrase: where
will it take me? Mangled language.
Poet: gardener of epitaphs.
The Petrifying Petrified
Deadland shadowland cactideous nopalopolis
rockboned mudded ashdust empty socket
petrified fire the sun did not drink the lake
the earth did not absorb it the water did not vanish into the air
men were the executors of the dust
wind swirled in the cold bed of fire
wind chanted litanies of drought
in the tomb of water wind
broken knife in the dormant crater wind
saltpeter whisper
The sun
solaortasoul centrotal soldonage split
the word that came down in tongues of fire smashed
the account and the count of the years
the chant of the days was a rain of scrap iron
slagheap of words sand primers
crushed screams hoofmuz zlebridlehar nessbit
disgraced bleary Cains ragged Abels
zealot assassins punditic pagans
slick crooks the woofs of the one-eyed dog
guide of the dead lost
in the coils of the Navel of the Moon
Valley of Mexico lips in eclipse
lava slobber Rage’s rotten throne
obstinate obsidian petrified
petrifying Rage
broken tower
tall as a scream smea
red breasts
clenched brow greendry bloodsnot
Rage
nailed in a wound ragerazor gazerblade
on a land of tines and spines
Circus of mountains
theater of clouds table of noon
mat of the moon garden of planets
drum of rain balcony of breezes
seat of the sun ball game of the constellations
Bursting images impaled images
the lopped hand leaps the torn tongue leaps
the sliced breasts leap the guillotined penis
over and over in the dust over and over in the courtyard
they trim the tree of blood the intelligent tree
The dust of stuffed images The Virgin
crown of snakes The Flayed
The Felled-by-Arrows The Crucified
The Hummingbird winged spark
flowerbrand The Flame
who speaks with words of water Our Lady
breasts of wine and belly of bread oven
where the dead burn and the living bake
The Spider daughter of air
in her house of air spins light
spins centuries and days The Rabbit
wind carved in the mirror of the moon
Images buried
in the eye of the dog of the dead fallen
in the blocked well of origins whirlwinds of reflections
in the stone theater of memory images
whirling in the circus of the empty eye ideas
of red brown and green swarms of flies
ideas ate the gods the gods
became ideas great bladders full of bile
the bladders burst the idols exploded
putrefaction of the gods the sanctuary was a dungheap
the dungheap a nursery armed ideas sprouted
ideolized ideodeities sharpened syllogisms
deified cannibals ideas idotic as deities
rabid dogs dogs in love with their own vomit
We have dug up Rage
The amphitheater of the genital sun is a dungheap
The fountain of lunar water is a dungheap
The lovers’ park is a dungheap
The library is a nest of killer rats
The university is a muck full of frogs
The altar is Chanfalla’s scam
The eggheads are stained with ink
The doctors dispute in a den of thieves
The businessmen
with fast hands and slow thoughts
negotiate in the graveyard
The dialecticians exalt the subtlety of the rope