by Octavio Paz
light touches the fruit, touches the invisible,
a pitcher for the eyes to drink clarity,
a clipped flower of flame, a sleepless candle
where the butterfly with black wings burns:
light smooths the creases in the sheets
and the folds of puberty,
it smolders in the fireplace, its flames shadows
that climb the walls like yearning ivy;
light does not absolve or condemn,
it is neither just nor unjust,
light with invisible hands constructs
the buildings of symmetry;
light goes off on a path of reflections
and comes back to itself:
a hand that invents itself, an eye
that sees itself in its own inventions.
Light is time thinking about itself.
A Wind Called Bob Rauschenberg
Landscape fallen from Saturn,
abandoned landscape,
plains of nuts and wheels and bars,
asthmatic turbines, broken propellers,
electrical scars,
desolate landscape:
the objects sleep side by side,
great flocks of things and things and things,
the objects sleep with eyes open
and slowly fall within themselves,
they fall without moving,
their fall is the stillness of a plain under the moon,
their sleep is a falling with no return,
a descent toward a space with no beginning,
the objects fall, they are in a state of falling,
they fall from my mind that thinks them,
they fall from my eyes that don’t see them,
they fall from my thoughts that speak them,
they fall like letters, letters, letters,
a rain of letters on a derelict landscape.
Fallen landscape,
strewn over itself, a great ox,
an ox crepuscular as this century that ends,
things sleep side by side—
iron and cotton, silk and coal,
synthetic fibers and grains of wheat,
screws and the wing-bones of a sparrow,
the crane, the woolen quilt, the family portrait,
the headlight, the crank and the hummingbird feather—
things sleep and talk in their sleep,
the wind blows over the things,
and what the things say in their sleep
the lunar wind says brushing past them,
it says it with reflections and colors that burn and sparkle,
the wind speaks forms that breathe and whirl,
the things hear them talking and take fright at the sound,
they were born mute, and now they sing and laugh,
they were paralytic, and now they dance,
the wind joins them and separates and joins them,
plays with them, unmakes and remakes them,
invents other things, never seen nor heard,
their unions and disjunctions
are clusters of tangible enigmas,
strange and changing forms of passion,
constellations of desire, rage, love,
figures of encounters and goodbyes.
The landscape opens its eyes and sits up,
sets out walking followed by its shadow,
it is a stela of dark murmurs
that are the languages of fallen matter,
the wind stops and hears the clamor of the elements,
sand and water talking in low voices,
the howl of pilings as they battle the salt,
the rash confidence of fire,
the soliloquy of ashes,
the interminable conversation of the universe.
Talking with the things and with ourselves
the universe talks to itself:
we are its tongue and ears, its words and silences.
The wind hears what the universe says
and we hear what the wind says,
rustling the submarine foliage of language,
the secret vegetation of the underworld and the undersky:
man dreams the dream of things,
time thinks the dreams of men.
The Four Poplars
for Claude Monet
As if it were behind itself this line runs
chasing itself through the horizontal confines
west, forever fugitive,
where it tracks itself it scatters
—as this same line
raised in a glance
transforms all of its letters
into a diaphanous column
breaking into an untouched
unheard, untasted, yet imagined
flower of vowels and consonants
—as this line that never stops writing itself
and before completion gathers itself
never ceasing to flow, but flowing upwards:
the four poplars.
Drawing breath
from the empty heights and there below,
doubled in a pond turned sky,
the four are a single poplar
and are none.
Behind, a flaming foliage
dies out—the afternoon’s adrift—
other poplars, now ghostly tatters,
interminably undulate,
interminably keep still.
Yellow slips into pink,
night insinuates itself in the violet.
Between the sky and the water
there is a blue and green band:
sun and aquatic plants,
a calligraphy of flames
written by the wind.
It is a reflection suspended in another.
Passages: a moment’s blink.
The world loses shape,
it is an apparition, it is four poplars,
four purple melodies.
Fragile branches creep up the trunks.
They are a bit of light and a bit of wind.
A motionless shimmer. With my eyes
I hear them murmur words of air.
Silence runs off with the creek,
comes back with the sky.
What I see is real:
four weightless poplars
planted in vertigo.
Fixed points that rush
down, rush up,
rush to the water of the sky of the marsh
in a wispy, tenuous travail
while the world sails into darkness.
Pulse-beat of last light:
fifteen beleaguered minutes
Claude Monet watches from a boat.
The sky immerses itself in the water,
the water drowns,
the poplar is an opal thrust:
this world is not solid.
Between being and non-being the grass wavers,
the elements become lighter,
outlines shade over,
glimmers, reflections, reverberations,
flashes of forms and presences,
image mist, eclipse:
what I see, we are: mirages.
A Tree Within
A tree grew inside my head.
A tree grew in.
Its roots are veins,
its branches nerves,
thoughts its tangled foliage.
Your glance sets it on fire,
and its fruits of shade
are blood oranges
and pomegranates of flame. Day breaks
in the body’s night.
There within, inside my head,
the tree speaks. Come closer—can you hear it?
Before the Beginning
A confusion of sounds, a vague clarity.
Another day begins.
It is a room, half-lit,
and two bodies stretched out.
In my mind I am lost
on a plain with no one.
The hours sharpen their knives.
But at my side, you are breathing;
buried deep, and remote,
you flow without moving.
Unreachable as I think of you,
touching you with my eyes,
watching you with my hands.
Dreams divide
and blood unites us:
we are a river of pulse-beats.
Under your eyelids the seed
of the sun ripens. The world
is still not real;
time wonders: all that is certain
is the heat of your skin.
In your breath I hear
the tide of being,
the forgotten syllable of the Beginning.
Pillars
And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay . . .
John Donne
The plaza is tiny.
Four leprous walls,
a fountain with no water,
two cement benches,
some injured ash trees.
The distant commotion
of civic rivers.
Vague and enormous,
night turns and covers
the solemn architecture.
They have lit the lights.
In the gulfs of shadow,
on corners, in doorways,
columns sprout, alive
and immobile: the couples.
Entwined and hushed,
weaving whispers,
pillars of heartbeats.
In the other hemisphere
night is feminine,
abundant and aquatic.
There are islands that blaze
in the waters of the sky.
The leaves of banana trees
turn shadows green.
In the middle of space,
we are still entwined,
a tree that breathes.
Our bodies are covered
with vines of syllables.
Foliage of murmurs,
crickets insomniac
in the sleeping grass,
the stars are swimming
in a pool of frogs,
summer collects
its pitchers in the sky,
with invisible hands
the air opens a door.
Your forehead’s the terrace
the moon prefers.
The moment is immense,
the world is now small.
I am lost in your eyes,
and lost, I see you
lost in my eyes.
Our names have burned down,
our bodies have gone.
We are in the magnetic
center of—what?
Motionless couples
in a Mexican park,
or in a garden in Asia:
daily Eucharists
under their various stars.
On the ladder of touch
we climb and descend
from top to bottom,
kingdom of roots,
republic of wings.
Knotted bodies
are the book of the soul:
with eyes closed,
with my touch and my tongue,
I write out on your body
the scripture of the world.
A knowledge still nameless:
the taste of this earth.
Brief light enough
to light and blind us
like the sudden burst
of seedpod and semen.
Between the end and the beginning,
a moment without time,
a delicate arch of blood,
a bridge over the void.
Locked, two bodies
sculpt a bolt of lightning.
As One Listens to the Rain
Listen to me as one listens to the rain,
not attentive, not distracted,
light footsteps, thin drizzle,
water that is air, air that is time,
the day is still leaving,
the night has yet to arrive,
figurations of mist
at the turn of the corner,
figurations of time
at the bend in this pause,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
without listening, hear what I say
with eyes open inward, asleep
with all five senses awake,
it’s raining, light footsteps, a murmur of syllables,
air and water, words with no weight:
what we were and are,
the days and years, this moment,
weightless time and heavy sorrow,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
wet asphalt is shining,
steam rises and walks away,
night unfolds and looks at me,
you are you and your body of steam,
you and your face of night,
you and your hair, unhurried lightning,
you cross the street and enter my forehead,
footsteps of water across my eyes,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the asphalt’s shining, you cross the street,
it is the mist, wandering in the night,
it is the night, asleep in your bed,
it is the surge of waves in your breath,
your fingers of water dampen my forehead,
your fingers of flame burn my eyes,
your fingers of air open time’s eyelids,
a spring of visions and resurrections,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the years go by, the moments return,
do you hear your footsteps in the next room?
not here, not there: you hear them
in another time that is now,
listen to the footsteps of time,
inventor of places with no weight, nowhere,
listen to the rain running over the terrace,
the night is now more night in the grove,
lightning has nestled among the leaves,
a restless garden adrift—go in,
your shadow covers this page.
Letter of Testimony
Cantata
1.
Between night and day
there is an uncertain territory.
It is neither light nor shadow: it is time.
The hour, the precarious pause,
the darkening page,
the page where I write,
slowly, these words. The afternoon
is an ember burning itself out.
The day turns, dropping its leaves.
A dark river files
at the edges of things. Tranquil, persistent,
it drags them along, I don’t know where.
Reality drifts off. I write:
I talk to myself
—I talk to you.
I wanted to talk to you
as the air and this small tree
talk to each other,
nearly erased by the shadows;
like running water;
a sleepwalking soliloquy;
&nbs
p; like a still puddle,
reflector of instantaneous simulacra;
like fire:
with tongues of flame, a dance of sparks,
tales of smoke. To talk to you
with visible and tangible words,
words with weight, flavor and smell,
like things. While I speak,
things imperceptibly
shake loose from themselves,
and escape toward other forms,
other names. They leave me these words:
with them I talk to you.
Words are bridges.
And they are traps, jails, wells.
I talk to you: you don’t hear me.
I don’t talk with you: I talk with a word.
That word is you, that word
carries you from yourself to yourself.
You, I, and fate created it.
The woman that you are
is the woman I talk to:
these words are your mirror,
you are yourself and the echo of your name.
I, too, talking to you,
turn into a whisper,
air and words, a puff,
a ghost that rises from these letters.
Words are bridges:
the shadow of the hills of Meknès
over a field of static sunflowers
is a violet bay.
It is three in the afternoon,
you are nine years old and asleep
in the cool arms of a pale mimosa.
In love with geometry
a hawk draws a circle.
The soft copper of the mountains
trembles on the horizon.
The white cubes of a village
in the dizzying cliffs.
A column of smoke rises from the plain
and slowly scatters, air into the air,
like the song of the muezzin
that drills through the silence, ascends and flowers
in another silence. Motionless sun,
the enormous space of spread wings;
over the flat stretches of reflections
thirst raises transparent minarets.
You are neither asleep nor awake:
you float in a time without hours.
A breeze barely stirs
the distant lands of mint and fountains.
Let yourself be carried by these words
toward yourself.
2.
Words are inexact
and say inexact things.
But saying this or that, they say us.
Love is an equivocal word,
like all words. It is not a word,
said the Founder: it is a vision,
base and crown