The Poems of Octavio Paz

by Octavio Paz

  The casuists sprinkle thugs with holy water

  nursing violence with dogmatic milk

  The fixed idea gets drunk with its opposite

  The juggling ideologist sharpener of sophisms

  in his house of truncated quotations and assignations

  plots Edens for industrious eunuchs

  forest of gallows paradise of cages

  Stained images

  spit on the origins

  future jailerspresent leeches

  affront the living body of time

  We have dug up Rage

  On the chest of Mexico tablets written by the sun

  stairway of the centuries spiral terrace of wind

  the disinterred dances anger panting thirst

  the blind in combat beneath the noon sun thirst panting anger

  beating each other with rocks the blind are beating each other

  the men are cracking apart the stones are cracking apart

  within there is a water we drink bitter water

  water whetting thirst

  Where is the other water?

  San Ildefonso Nocturne

  1.

  In my window night invents another night,

  another space: carnival convulsed

  in a square yard of blackness. Momentary

  confederations of fire, nomadic geometries,

  errant numbers. From yellow to green to red,

  the spiral unwinds. Window:

  magnetic plate of calls and answers,

  high-voltage calligraphy,

  false heaven/hell of industry

  on the changing skin of the moment.

  Sign-seeds: the night shoots them off,

  they rise, bursting above,

  fall

  still burning in a cone of shadow,

  reappear,

  rambling sparks, syllable-clusters,

  spinning flames that scatter,

  smithereens once more.

  The city invents and erases them.

  I am at the entrance to a tunnel.

  These phrases drill through time.

  Perhaps I am that which waits at the end of the tunnel.

  I speak with eyes closed. Someone

  has planted a forest of magnetic needles

  in my eyelids, someone

  guides the thread of these words. The page

  has become an ants’ nest. The void

  has settled at the pit of my stomach. I fall

  endlessly through that void. I fall without falling.

  My hands are cold, my feet cold—

  but the alphabets are burning, burning. Space

  makes and unmakes itself. The night insists,

  the night touches my forehead, touches my thoughts.

  What does it want?

  2.

  Empty streets, squinting lights. On a corner,

  the ghost of a dog scours the garbage

  for a spectral bone. Uproar in a nearby patio:

  cacophonous cockpit. Mexico, circa 1931.

  Loitering sparrows, a flock of children

  builds a nest of unsold newspapers.

  In the desolation the streetlights invent

  unreal pools of yellowish light. Apparitions:

  time splits open: a lugubrious, lascivious clatter of heels,

  beneath a sky of soot the flash of a skirt.

  C’est la mort—ou la morte . . . The indifferent wind

  rips posters from the walls.

  At this hour, the red walls of San Ildefonso

  are black, and they breathe: sun turned to time,

  time turned to stone, stone turned to body.

  These streets were once canals. In the sun,

  the houses were silver: city of mortar and stone,

  moon fallen in the lake. Over the filled canals

  and the buried idols the criollos erected

  another city

  —not white, but red and gold—

  idea turned to space, tangible number. They placed it

  at the crossroads of eight directions, its doors

  open to the invisible: heaven and hell.

  Sleeping district. We walk through arcades of echoes,

  past broken images: our history.

  Hushed nation of stones. Churches,

  dome-growths, their facades

  petrified gardens of symbols. Shipwrecked

  in the spiteful proliferation of dwarf houses:

  humiliated palaces, fountains without water,

  affronted frontispieces. Cumuli,

  insubstantial madrepore, accumulate

  over the ponderous bulks, conquered

  not by the weight of the years

  but by the infamy of the present.

  Plaza del Zócalo,

  vast as the heavens: diaphanous space,

  court of echoes. There,

  with Alyosha K and Julien S, we devised bolts of lightning

  against the century and its cliques. The wind of thought

  carried us away, the verbal wind,

  the wind that plays with mirrors, master of reflections,

  builder of cities of air, geometries

  hung from the thread of reason.

  Shut down for the night, the yellow trolleys,

  giant worms. S’s and Z’s:

  a crazed auto, insect with malicious eyes.

  Ideas,

  fruits within an arm’s reach, like stars,

  burning.

  The girandola is burning, the adolescent dialogue,

  the scorched hasty frame. The bronze fist

  of the towers beats 12 times.

  Night

  bursts into pieces, gathers them by itself,

  and becomes one, intact. We disperse,

  not there in the plaza with its dead trains, but here,

  on this page: petrified letters.

  3.

  The boy who walks through this poem,

  between San Ildefonso and the Zócalo,

  is the man who writes it: this page too

  is a ramble through the night. Here the friendly ghosts

  become flesh and ideas dissolve.

  Good, we wanted good; to set the world right.

  We didn’t lack integrity: we lacked humility.

  What we wanted was not wanted out of innocence.

  Precepts and concepts, the arrogance of theologians,

  to beat with a cross, to institute with blood,

  to build the house with bricks of crime,

  to declare obligatory communion. Some

  became secretaries to the secretary

  to the Secretary General of Hell. Rage

  became philosophy, its drivel has covered the planet.

  Reason came down to earth,

  took the form of a gallows—and is worshipped by millions.

  Circular plot: we have all been,

  in the Grand Theater of Filth,

  judge, executioner, victim, witness, we have all

  given false testimony against the others

  and against ourselves. And the most vile: we

  were the public that applauded or yawned in its seats.

  The guilt that knows no guilt, innocence

  was the greatest guilt. Each year was a mountain of bones.

  Conversions, retractions, excommunications,

  reconciliations, apostasies, recantations,

  the zigzag of the demonolatries and the androlatries,

  bewitchments and aberrations:

  my history. Are they the histories of an error?

  History is the error. Beyond
dates,

  before names, truth is that

  which history scorns: the everyday

  —everyone’s anonymous heartbeat, the unique

  beat of every one—the unrepeatable

  everyday, identical to all days. Truth

  is the base of a time without history. The weight

  of the weightless moment: a few stones in the sun

  seen long ago, today return,

  stones of time that are also stone

  beneath this sun of time,

  sun that comes from a dateless day, sun

  that lights up these words, sun of words

  that burns out when they are named. Suns, words, stones,

  burn and burn out: the moment burns them

  without burning. Hidden, unmoving, untouchable,

  the present—not its presences—is always.

  Between seeing and making, contemplation or action,

  I chose the act of words: to make them, to inhabit them,

  to give eyes to the language. Poetry is not truth:

  it is the resurrection of presences, history

  transfigured in the truth of undated time.

  Poetry, like history, is made;

  poetry,

  like truth, is seen. Poetry:

  incarnation

  of the-sun-on-the-stones in a name, dissolution

  of the name in a beyond of stones.

  Poetry, suspension bridge between history and truth,

  is not a path toward this or that: it is to see

  the stillness in motion, the change

  in stillness. History is the path:

  it goes nowhere, we all walk it,

  truth is to walk it. We neither go nor come:

  we are in the hands of time. Truth:

  to know ourselves, from the beginning,

  hung.

  A brotherhood over the void.

  4.

  Ideas scatter, the ghosts remain:

  the truth of what is lived and suffered.

  An almost empty taste remains: time

  —shared fury—time

  —shared oblivion—in the end transfigured

  in memory and its incarnations. What remains is

  time as apportioned body: language.

  In the window, travesties of battle

  flare up, go out,

  the commercial sky of advertisements. Behind,

  barely visible, the true constellations.

  Among the water towers, antennas, rooftops,

  a liquid column, more mental than corporeal,

  a waterfall of silence: the moon.

  Neither phantom nor idea: once a goddess,

  now a wandering clarity.

  My wife sleeps. She too is a moon,

  a clarity that travels—not between the reefs of the clouds,

  but between the rocks and wracks of dreams:

  she too is a soul. She flows below her closed eyes,

  a silent torrent rushing down

  from her forehead to her feet, she tumbles within,

  bursts out from within, her heartbeats sculpt her,

  traveling through herself she invents herself,

  inventing herself she copies it,

  she is an arm of the sea between the islands of her breasts,

  her belly a lagoon where shadows and foliage blur,

  she flows through her shape,

  rises,

  falls,

  scatters in herself,

  ties

  herself to her flowing, disperses in her form:

  she too is a body. Truth

  is the swell of a breath

  and the visions closed eyes see:

  the palpable mystery of the person.

  The night is at the point of running over. It grows light.

  The horizon has become aquatic. To rush down

  from the heights of this hour: will dying

  be a falling or a rising, a sensation or a cessation?

  I close my eyes, I hear in my skull

  the footsteps of my blood, I hear

  time pass through my temples. I am still alive.

  The room is covered with moon. Woman:

  fountain in the night. I am bound to her quiet flowing.

  * * * *

  El fuego de cada día

  A Juan García Ponce

  Como el aire hace y deshace

  sobre las páginas de la geología,

  sobre las mesas planetarias,

  sus invisibles edificios: el hombre.

  Su lenguaje es un grano apenas,

  pero quemante, en la palma del espacio.

  Sílabas son incandescencias.

  También son plantas: sus raíces

  fracturan el silencio, sus ramas

  construyen casas de sonidos. Sílabas:

  se enlazan y se desenlazan, juegan

  a las semejanzas y las desemejanzas.

  Sílabas: maduran en las frentes,

  florecen en las bocas. Sus raíces

  beben noche, comen luz. Lenguajes:

  árboles incandescentes

  de follajes de lluvias.

  Vegetaciones de relámpagos,

  geometrías de ecos:

  sobre la hoja de papel

  el poema se hace como el día

  sobre la palma del espacio.

  La arboleda

  A Pere Gimferrer

  Enorme y sólida pero oscilante,

  golpeada por el viento pero encadenada,

  rumor de un millón de hojas

  contra mi ventana. Motín de árboles,

  oleaje de sonidos verdinegros. La arboleda,

  quieta de pronto, es un tejido de ramas y frondas.

  Hay claros llameantes. Caída en esas redes

  se resuelve, respira

  una materia violenta y resplandeciente,

  un animal iracundo y rápido,

  cuerpo de lumbre entre las hojas: el día.

  A la izquierda del macizo, más idea que color,

  poco cielo y muchas nubes, el azuleo de una cuenca

  rodeada de peñones en demolición, arena precipitada

  en el embudo de la arboleda. En la región central

  gruesas gotas de tinta esparcidas

  sobre un papel que el poniente inflama,

  negro casi enteramente allá, en el extremo sudeste,

  donde se derrumba el horizonte. La enramada,

  vuelta cobre, relumbra. Tres mirlos

  atraviesan la hoguera y reaparecen, ilesos,

  en una zona vacía: ni luz ni sombra. Nubes

  en marcha hacia su disolución.

  Encienden luces en las casas.

  El cielo se acumula en la ventana. El patio,

  encerrado en sus cuatro muros, se aísla más y más.

  Así perfecciona su realidad. El bote de basura,

  la maceta sin planta, ya no son,

  sobre el opaco cemento, sino sacos de sombras.

  Sobre sí mismo el espacio

  se cierra. Poco a poco se petrifican los nombres.

  Paisaje inmemorial

  A José de la Colina

  Se mece aérea se desliza

  entre ramas troncos postes

  revolotea perezosa

  entre los altos frutos eléctricos

  cae oblicua

  ya azul

  sobre la otra nieve

  Hecha

  de la misma inmateria que la sombra

  no arroja sombra alguna Tiene

  la densidad del silencio La nieve

  es nieve pero quema

  Los far
os

  perforan súbitos túneles al instante

  desmoronados La noche

  acribillada crece se adentra

  se ennochece Pasan

  los autos obstinados todos

  por distintas direcciones

  hacia el mismo destino

  Un día

  en los tallos de hierro

  estallarán las lámparas Un día

  el mugido del río de motores

  ha de apagarse Un día

  estas casas serán colinas

  otra vez el viento entre las piedras

  hablará a solas Oblicua

  entre las sombras insombra

  ha de caer casi azul

  sobre la tierra La misma de ahora

  la nieve de hace un millón de años

  Trowbridge Street

  1.

  El sol dentro del día El frío dentro del sol

  Calles sin nadie autos parados

  Todavía no hay nieve hay viento viento

  Arde todavía en el aire helado

  un arbolito rojo

  Hablo con él al hablar contigo

  2.

  Estoy en un cuarto abandonado del lenguaje

  Tú estás en otro cuarto idéntico

  O los dos estamos

  en una calle que tu mirada ha despoblado

  El mundo

  imperceptiblemente se deshace Memoria

  desmoronada bajo nuestros pasos

  Estoy parado a la mitad de esta línea

  no escrita

  3.

  Las puertas se abren y cierran solas El aire

  entra y sale por nuestra casa El aire

  habla a solas al hablar contigo El aire

  sin nombre por el pasillo interminable

  No se sabe quién está del otro lado El aire

  da vueltas y vueltas por mi cráneo vacío El aire

  vuelve aire todo lo que toca El aire

  con dedos de aire disipa lo que digo

  Soy aire que no miras

  No puedo abrir tus ojos No puedo cerrar la puerta

  El aire se ha vuelto sólido

  4.

  Esta hora tiene la forma de una pausa

  La pausa tiene tu forma

  Tú tienes la forma de una fuente

  no de agua sino de tiempo

  En lo alto del chorro de la fuente

  saltan mis pedazos

  el fui el soy el no soy todavía

  Mi vida no pesa El pasado se adelgaza

  El futuro es un poco de agua en tus ojos