The Poems of Octavio Paz

by Octavio Paz

  lived together in streets, plazas, buses, taxis, movie houses, theaters, bars, hotels, pigeon coops and catacombs,

  the enormous city that fits in a room three yards square and endless as a galaxy,

  the city that dreams us all, that all of us build and unbuild and rebuild as we dream,

  the city we all dream, that restlessly changes while we dream it,

  the city that wakes every hundred years and looks at itself in the mirror of a word and doesn’t recognize itself and goes back to

  sleep,

  the city that sprouts from the eyelids of the woman who sleeps at my side, and is transformed,

  with its monuments and statues, its histories and legends,

  into a fountain made of countless eyes, and each eye reflects the same landscape, frozen in time,

  before schools and prisons, alphabets and numbers, the altar and the law:

  the river that is four rivers, the orchard, the tree, the Female and Male, dressed in wind—

  to go back, go back, to be clay again, to bathe in that light, to sleep under those votive lights,

  to float on the waters of time like the flaming maple leaf the current drags along,

  to go back—are we asleep or awake?—we are, we are nothing more, day breaks, it’s early,

  we are in the city, we cannot leave, except to fall into another city, different yet identical,

  I speak of the immense city, that daily reality composed of two words: the others,

  and in every one of them there is an I clipped from a we, an I adrift,

  I speak of the city built by the dead, inhabited by their stern ghosts, ruled by their despotic memory,

  the city I talk to when I talk to nobody, the city that dictates these insomniac words,

  I speak of towers, bridges, tunnels, hangars, wonders and disasters,

  the abstract State and its concrete police, the schoolteachers, jailers, preachers,

  the shops that have everything, where we spend everything, and it all turns to smoke,

  the markets with their pyramids of fruit, the turn of the seasons, the sides of beef hanging from the hooks, the hills of spices and the towers of bottles and preserves,

  all of the flavors and colors, all the smells and all the stuff, the tide of voices—water, metal, wood, clay—the bustle, the haggling and conniving as old as time,

  I speak of the buildings of stone and marble, of cement, glass and steel, of the people in the lobbies and doorways, of the elevators that rise and fall like the mercury in thermometers,

  of the banks and their boards of directors, of factories and their managers, of the workers and their incestuous machines,

  I speak of the timeless parade of prostitution through streets long as desire and boredom,

  of the coming and going of cars, mirrors of our anxieties, business, passions (why? toward what? for what?),

  of the hospitals that are always full, and where we always die alone,

  I speak of the half-light of certain churches and the flickering candles at the altars,

  the timid voices with which the desolate talk to saints and virgins in a passionate, failing language,

  I speak of dinner under a squinting light at a limping table with chipped plates,

  of the innocent tribes that camp in the empty lots with their women and children, their animals and their ghosts,

  of the rats in the sewers and the brave sparrows that nest in the wires, in the cornices and the martyred trees,

  of the contemplative cats and their libertine novels in the light of the moon, cruel goddess of the rooftops,

  of the stray dogs that are our Franciscans and bhikkus, the dogs that scratch up the bones of the sun,

  I speak of the anchorite and the libertarian brotherhood, of the secret plots of law enforcers and of bands of thieves,

  of the conspiracies of levelers and the Society of Friends of Crime, of the Suicide Club, and of Jack the Ripper,

  of the Friend of the People, sharpener of the guillotine, of Caesar, Delight of Humankind,

  I speak of the paralytic slum, the cracked wall, the dry fountain, the graffitied statue,

  I speak of garbage heaps the size of mountains, and of melancholy sunlight filtered by the smog,

  of broken glass and the desert of scrap iron, of last night’s crime, and of the banquet of the immortal Trimalchio,

  of the moon in the television antennas, and a butterfly on a filthy jar,

  I speak of dawns like a flight of herons on the lake, and the sun of transparent wings that lands on the rock foliage of the churches, and the twittering of light on the glass stalks of the palaces,

  I speak of certain afternoons in early fall, waterfalls of immaterial gold, the transformation of this world, when everything loses its body, everything is held in suspense,

  and the light thinks, and each one of us feels himself thought by that reflective light, and for one long moment time dissolves, we are air once more,

  I speak of the summer, of the slow night that grows on the horizon like a mountain of smoke, and bit by bit it crumbles, falling over us like a wave,

  the elements are reconciled, night has stretched out, and its body is a powerful river of sudden sleep, we rock in the waves of its breathing, the hour is tangible, we can touch it like a fruit,

  they have lit the lights, and the avenues burn with the brilliancy of desire, in the parks electric light breaks through the branches and falls over us like a green and phosphorescent mist that illuminates but does not dampen us, the trees murmur, they tell us something,

  there are streets in the half-light that are a smiling insinuation, we don’t know where they lead, perhaps to the ferry for the lost islands,

  I speak of the stars over the high terraces and the indecipherable sentences they write on the stone of the sky,

  I speak of the sudden downpour that lashes the windowpanes and bends the trees, that lasted twenty-five minutes and now, up above, there are blue slits and streams of light, steam rises from the asphalt, the cars glisten, there are puddles where ships of reflections sail,

  I speak of nomadic clouds, and of a thin music that lights a room on the fifth floor, and a murmur of laughter in the middle of the night like water that flows far-off through roots and grasses,

  I speak of the longed-for encounter with that unexpected form with which the unknown is made flesh, and revealed to each of us:

  eyes that are the night half-open and the day that wakes, the sea stretching out and the flame that speaks, powerful breasts: lunar tide,

  lips that say sesame, and time opens, and the little room becomes a garden of change, air and fire entwine, earth and water mingle,

  or the arrival of that moment there, on the other side that is really here, where the key locks and time ceases to flow:

  the moment of until now, the last of the gasps, the moaning, the anguish, the soul loses its body and crashes through a hole in the floor, falling in itself, and time has run aground, and we walk through an endless corridor, panting in the sand,

  is that music coming closer or receding, are those pale lights just lit or going out? space is singing, time has vanished: it is the gasp, it is the glance that slips through the blank wall, it is the wall that stays silent, the wall,

  I speak of our public history, and of our secret history, yours and mine,

  I speak of the forest of stone, the desert of the prophets, the ant-heap of souls, the congregation of tribes, the house of mirrors, the labyrinth of echoes,

  I speak of the great murmur that comes from the depths of time, the incoherent whisper of nations uniting or splitting apart, the wheeling of multitudes and their weapons like boulders hurling down, the dull sound of bones falling into the pit of history,

  I speak of the city, shepherd of the centuries, mother that g
ives birth to us and devours us, that creates us and forgets our existence.

  To Talk

  I read in a poem:

  to talk is divine.

  But gods don’t speak:

  they create and destroy worlds

  while men do the talking.

  Gods, without words,

  play terrifying games.

  The spirit descends,

  untying tongues,

  but it doesn’t speak words:

  it speaks flames.

  Language, lit by a god,

  is a prophecy

  of flames and a crash

  of burnt syllables:

  meaningless ash.

  Man’s word

  is the daughter of death.

  We talk because we are

  mortal: words

  are not signs, they are years.

  Saying what they say,

  the names we speak

  say time: they say us,

  we are the names of time.

  To talk is human.

  A Waking

  I was walled inside a dream.

  Its walls had no consistency,

  no weight: its emptiness was its weight.

  The walls were hours and the hours

  unwavering hoarded sorrow.

  The time of those hours was not time.

  I leapt through a breach: in this world

  it was four o’clock. The room was my room

  and my ghost was in each thing.

  I wasn’t there. I looked out the window:

  not a soul under the electric light.

  Vigilant street lamps, dirty snow,

  houses and cars asleep, the insomnia

  of a lamp, the oak that talks to itself,

  the wind and its knives, the illegible

  writing of the constellations.

  Things were buried deep in themselves

  and my eyes of flesh saw them

  weary of being, realities

  stripped of their names. My two eyes

  were souls grieving for the world.

  On the empty street the presence

  passed without passing, vanishing

  into its forms, frozen in its changes,

  and turned now into houses, oaks, snow, time.

  Life and death flowed on, blurred together.

  Uninhabited sight, the presence

  looked at me with nobody’s eyes:

  a bundle of reflections over the cliffs.

  I looked inside: the room was my room

  and I wasn’t there. Being lacks nothing

  —always full of itself, always the same—

  even though we are not there . . . Outside,

  the clarities, still indistinct:

  dawn in the jumble of the rooftops.

  The constellations were being erased.

  The Face and the Wind

  Beneath an unrelenting sun:

  ocher plains, lion-colored hills.

  I struggled up a craggy slope of goats

  to a place of rubble:

  lopped columns, headless gods.

  Surreptitious flashes of light:

  a snake, or some small lizard.

  Hidden in the rocks,

  the color of toxic ink,

  colonies of brittle beetles.

  A circular courtyard, a wall full of cracks.

  Clutching the earth—blind knot,

  tree all roots—a pipal, the religious fig.

  Rain of light. A gray hulk: the Buddha,

  its features a blurred mass.

  Ants climbed and descended

  the slopes of its face.

  Still intact,

  the smile, that smile:

  a gulf of pacific clarity.

  And I was, for a moment, diaphanous,

  a wind that stops

  turns on itself and is gone.

  A Fable of Joan Miró

  Blue was immobilized between red and black.

  The wind came and went, over the page of the plains,

  lighting small fires, wallowing in the ashes,

  went off with its face sooty, shouting on the corners,

  the wind came and went, opening, closing windows and doors,

  came and went through the twilit corridors of the skull,

  the wind in a scrawl, with ink-stained hands

  wrote and erased what it had written on the wall of the day.

  The sun was no more than an omen of the color yellow,

  a hint of feathers, a cock’s future crow.

  The snow had gone astray, the sea had lost its speech

  and was a wandering murmur, a few vowels in search of a word.

  Blue was immobilized, no one saw it, no one heard:

  red was a blind man, black a deaf mute.

  The wind came and went, asking, Where are you going Joan Miró?

  He had been here from the beginning, but the wind hadn’t seen him:

  immobilized between blue and red, black and yellow,

  Miró was a transparent mirage, a mirage with seven hands.

  Seven hands in the form of ears, to hear the seven colors,

  seven hands in the form of feet, to climb the seven steps of the rainbow,

  seven hands in the form of roots, to be everywhere and in Barcelona at the same time.

  Miró was a mirage with seven hands.

  With the first hand, he beat the drum of the moon,

  with the second, he scattered birds in the garden of the wind,

  with the third, he rattled the dice-cup of the stars,

  with the fourth, he wrote The Legend of the Centuries of Snails,

  with the fifth, he planted islands in the chest of green,

  with the sixth, he created a woman by mixing night and water, music and electricity,

  with the seventh, he erased everything he had made and started over again.

  Red opened its eyes, black mumbled something incoherent, and blue got up.

  None of them could believe what it saw:

  were those eight hawks or eight umbrellas?

  The eight spread their wings and flew off, disappearing through a broken windowpane.

  Miró set fire to his canvases.

  Lions and spiders burned, women and stars,

  the sky filled with triangles, spheres, discs, hexahedrons in flames,

  the blaze consumed the planetary farmer planted in the middle of space,

  butterflies, flying fish and wheezing phonographs sprouted from the ash-heap,

  but between the holes in the charred paintings

  blue space came back, and the swallow’s flash, the foliage of the clouds, and the flowering rod:

  it was spring insisting, insisting with its green airs.

  In the face of such luminous stubbornness, Miró scratched his head with his fifth hand, muttering to himself, I work like a gardener.

  A garden of stones or of boats? Pulleys or ballerinas?

  Blue, black, and red ran through the meadows,

  the stars were walking naked, but the shivering hills snuggled under the sheets,

  there were portable volcanoes and fireworks at home.

  The two ladies who guard the entrance to the doors of perception, Geometry and Perspective,

  had taken Miró’s arm and gone for a bit of air, singing Une étoile caresse le sein d’une négresse.

  The wind turned around on the page of the plains, lifted its head and said, But where are you going Joan Miró?

  He had been here from the beginning and the wind hadn’t seen him:

  Miró was a transparent mirage where hectic alphabets came a
nd went.

  These were not letters coming and going through the tunnels of his eyes:

  they were living things that joined and split apart, embraced, gnawed on each other and scattered,

  running over the page in frantic, multicolored rows, they had tails and horns,

  some were covered with scales, others with feathers, others were stark naked,

  and the words they formed were palpable, audible, edible, but unpronounceable,

  these were not letters but sensations, these were not sensations but transfigurations.

  And for what? To scratch a line in the hermit’s cell,

  to light the moon-head of a peasant with a sunflower,

  to welcome the night that comes with its blue characters and festival birds,

  to hail death with a round of geraniums,

  to say good morning to morning when it comes without ever asking where it comes from or where it goes,

  to remember that a waterfall is a girl coming down the stairs dying of laughter,

  to see the sun and its planets swinging on the trapeze of the horizon,

  to learn to see so that things will see us and come and go through our seeing,

  living alphabets that send out roots, shoot up, bud, flower, fly off, scatter, fall.

  Sight is seed, to see is to sow, Miró works like a gardener

  and with his seven hands endlessly sketches—circle and tail, oh! and ah!—

  that great exclamation with which the world begins each day.

  Sight and Touch

  for Balthus

  Light holds them—weightless, real—

  the white hill and the black oaks,

  the path that runs on,

  the tree that remains;

  the rising light seeks its way,

  a wavering river that sketches

  its doubts and turns them to certainties,

  a river of dawn across closed eyes;

  light sculpts the wind in the curtains,

  makes each hour a living body,

  comes into the room and slips off,

  slipperless, along the edge of a knife;

  light creates a woman in a mirror,

  naked under the diaphanous leaves,

  a glance can enchain her,

  she vanishes with a blink;