by Octavio Paz
The garden is tiny, the sky immense.
These four lines could be placed at the other entrance, on the pediment or the lintel:
Rectangle of ease: a few palms,
jade sprays; and time flows, water
sings, stones keep still, and the soul,
dangling in the moment, is a fountain.
This poem could be placed inside the garden, perhaps on the fountain. I imagine a wall over which falls a transparent curtain of water where one reads the four lines:
Rain, loose hair and dancing feet,
its ankle bitten by lightning,
comes down to the sound of drumbeats:
the tree opens its eyes and grows green.
Colophon
Written after visiting the site:
A crowded desert, a few palms,
plucked feather dusters, motors
rattling, a prison wall,
dust and trash, no man’s land.
Written remembering a certain garden:
In my ruins, this lush survivor:
you see yourself in my eyes, touch yourself,
you know yourself in me, and you think,
in me you endure, in me you vanish.
“Epitaph for no stone”:
Mixcoac was my village: three nocturnal syllables,
a half-mask of shadow across a face of sun.
Our Lady, Mother Dustcloud, came,
came and ate it. I went out in the world.
My words were my house, air my tomb.
May 1989
The Green News
for Roger Munier
Born at the edge of a brick
in a corner of the patio,
a tuft of grass, warrior
against air and light,
though air and light itself.
Clarity sharpened
into valiant pins,
tenacious sap turned into transparency:
on diaphanous stalks,
instantaneous emeralds.
Dew-sprout,
you shoot from the rock
like an exclamation.
Just born,
you’re a thousand years old and a minute,
each day the first day of the world.
You’re a little air
and a drop of sun,
you’re a blink.
You dance going nowhere,
stillness swaying
in the palm of the wind.
Bundle of spears of glass and sparks,
will of the earth turned into reflections,
more light than grass and more than light,
tangible breath untouched:
the sudden body of the instant.
Day opens its blossom,
noon is immobilized,
I write on a table, I stop,
I hear the silence of the wood,
I see the green glare, time half-opens.
Breathing
Still bodiless:
disheveled spring.
Invisible yet tangible,
it leaps around the corner,
hurries by, vanishes,
touches my forehead: no one there.
Spring air.
Nobody knows
how it appears and disappears.
The sun opens its eyes:
the world
has just turned twenty.
Light beats behind the blinds.
Sprouts shoot in my thoughts.
Air more than leaves,
a flutter barely green,
they turn for a moment and scatter.
Time weighs a little less. I breathe.
Soliloquy
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
persistent, flowing through fallen shadows,
excavating tunnels, drilling silences,
insisting, running under my pillow,
brushing past my temples, covering my eyelids
with another, intangible skin made of air,
its wandering nations, its drowsy tribes
migrate through the provinces of my body,
it crosses, re-crosses under the bridges of my bones,
slips into my left ear,
spills out from my right,
climbs the nape of my neck,
turns and turns in my skull,
wanders across the terrace of my forehead,
conjures visions, scatters them,
erases my thoughts one by one, scatters them
with hands of unwetting water,
black surge, tide of pulse-beats,
murmur of water groping forward
repeating the same meaningless syllable,
I hear its sleepwalking delirium
losing itself in serpentine galleries of echoes,
it comes back, drifts off, comes back,
endlessly flings itself
off the edges of my cliffs,
and I don’t stop falling and I fall
endlessly in its falling,
I fall without moving, I fall
with a murmur of falling water,
I fall through myself without touching myself,
I fall through my center, far from me, far off,
I am here and I don’t know where here is,
what day is today? today is today,
it is always today and I am a date
lost between before and after,
yes and no, never and always,
this very moment and its flute solo
at the edge of the void, geometries
suspended in a timeless space,
cubes, pyramids, spheres, cones,
and the other toys of sleepless reason,
shapes made of crystal, light, air: ideas,
in the abstract sky of the mind,
fixed constellations, neither living nor dead,
spider threads and crystalline drivel,
woven by insomnia, unwoven at dawn,
river of thoughts I don’t think, that think me,
river, itinerant music, delta of silence,
soundless cataracts, tide at my eardrums,
desire and its eyes that touch,
its hands that see,
its bedroom that is a drop of dew,
its bed made from a single shaft of light, desire,
obelisk tattooed by death,
rage in its house of knives,
doubt with its triangular head,
remorse with its scalpel and lens,
the two sisters, fatigue and restlessness,
that battle tonight for my soul,
all of them, one after the other, fling themselves over,
hushed mumble of downcast eyes,
blurred murmur of water talking to itself,
no, it is not the murmur of water but of blood,
it comes and goes incessantly through my veins,
I am its prison, and it my jailer,
no, it is not blood, it is the days and years,
the dead hours and this instant
that is still alive, time falling
endlessly in itself,
I hear my breathing, falling, hurling down,
I am stretched out alongside myself,
far off, far, I am stretched out there, far off,
where is my left side, my right,
which way is north?
unmoving, rocked by the wave with no body,
I am a heartbeat, a blink of an eye
in a crease of time,
the moment opens and closes,
a hazy clarity shoots across,
is it coming or going? does it return or drift off?
echoes of footsteps, procession of shadows
in the theater of closed eyes,
torrent of heartbeats, drumroll of syllables
in the cave of my chest, chorus of psalms
in the temple of vertebrae and veins,
is it death arriving? is it day,
the inflexible every day? today is no longer today,
a black river drags me along and I am that river
what time is it, cruel clock, clock with no hours?
Mexico City, August 26, 1991
Snapshots
They appear, disappear, come back, chirp in the branches of the tree of nerves, peck at now-ripened hours—neither birds nor ideas: reminiscences, announcements;
comet-sensations, steps of the wind on the embers of autumn, sparks on a stalk of electric current: surprise, sudden rose;
shell abandoned on the beach of memory, shell that talks to itself, cup of whitecaps of stone, the ocean’s bedroom, shout turned to stone;
slow rotation of the countries, wandering bonfires, sudden paralysis of a desert of glass, treacherous transparencies, immensities that burn and burn out in the blink of an eye;
blood flows through tall stalks of mint and hills of salt, the cavalry of shadows camps on the banks of the moon, tattoo of drums in the dunes beneath a planet of bone;
the melancholy of a rusted bolt, a beetle crowned king of a broken cup, butterflies keeping watch over a sleeping fuselage, the turning of a sleepwalking pulley: premonitions and recollections;
small rain on the eyelids of dawn, persistent rain on the devastated summer, thin rain at the convalescent’s window, rain on the confetti from the party, rain of light feet and a sad smile;
a skull of quartz on the table of insomnia, the ruminations at dawn, the gnawed bones, scissors and drills, pins and knives, thought: alley of echoes;
speech without words, music more seen than heard, more thought than seen, music on the stalks of silence, blossom of clarities, wet flame;
swarm of reflections on the page, yesterday confused with today, the seen entwined with the half-seen, inventions of memory, gaps of reason;
encounters, farewells, ghosts of the eye, incarnations of touch, unnamed presences, seeds of time: at the wrong time.
The Same
As morning begins
in a deep-rooted world,
every thing is the same.
The quiet flare
of the rose that opens
in the arms of air.
And the quiet of the dove,
come from who knows where,
with white feathers and darting eyes.
Face to face, far and near,
the disheveled rose,
the polished dove.
The bodiless wind
runs through the branches:
everything changes, nothing remains.
The rose has two wings
and nests in a cornice,
settling in the vertigo.
Perfection unleaving,
revived by its scent.
the dove is flower and flame,
The different is now the same.
Houston, February 10, 1995
Target Practice
The tide covers, discovers, recovers, and always walks in the nude.
The tide weaves and unweaves, embraces and separates, is never the same and never another.
The tide, sculptor of forms that last as long as their surge.
The tide breaks rocks, polishes conches.
The tide always assaults itself.
The tide, surge of syllables of the interminable word, without beginning or end, spoken by the moon.
The tide is angry, and on some nights, beating against the rock coast, it announces the end of the world.
The tide, transparency crowned with whitecaps that vanish.
The perpetual tide, the unstable tide, the punctual tide.
The tide and its daggers, its swords, its tattered flags, the conquered, the victorious.
The tide, green spittle.
The tide, sleeping on the chest of the sun, dreaming of the moon.
The tide, blue and black, green and purple, dressed in the sun and undressed in the moon, spark of noon and heaving breath of night.
The tide at night, murmur of bare feet on the sand.
The tide, at dawn, opens the eyelids of the day.
The tide breathes in the deep night and, sleeping, speaks in dreams.
The tide that licks the corpses that the coast throws at it.
The tide rises, races, howls, knocks down the door, breaks the furniture, and then, on the shore, softly weeps.
The tide, madwoman writing indecipherable signs on the rocks, signs of death.
The sand guards the secrets of the tide.
Who is the tide talking to, all night long?
The tide is honest, and eventually returns all of its drowned.
Storms come and go, the tide remains.
The tide, hard-working washerwoman of the filth that people leave on the beach.
The tide does not remember where it came from or where it’s going, lost in its coming and going, between itself, among itself.
There, at the cliffs, the tide closes its fist and threatens the earth and sky.
The tide is immortal, its tomb is a cradle.
The tide, chained to its surge.
The melancholy of the tide under the rain in the vagaries of dawn.
The tide knocks down the trees and swallows the town.
The tide, an oily stain spreading with its millions of dead fish.
The tide, its breasts, its belly, its hips, its thighs, beneath the lips and between the arms of the wind in heat.
The spring of sweet water leaps from the rocks and falls into the bitter tide.
The tide, mother of gods and goddess herself, the long nights weeping on the islands of Ionia, the death of Pan.
The tide contaminated with chemical waste, the tide that poisons the planet.
The tide, the living carpet on which the constellations walk on tiptoes.
The tide, lioness whipped into fury by the hurricane, panther tamed by the moon.
The beggar, the nuisance, the bore: the tide.
Lightning splits the chest of the tide, plunges, disappears, and is reborn, turned into a little foam.
The yellow tide, the hired mourner and her flock of laments, the bilious and her wealth in complaints.
The tide: does it walk asleep or awake?
Whispers, laughter, murmurs: the coming and going of the tide in the coral gardens of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, in the cove of Unawatuna.
The tide, horizon that drifts off, hypnotist’s mirror that mesmerizes lovers.
The tide with liquid hands opens the deserted lands populated by the gaze of the contemplative.
The tide lifts these words, rocks them for a moment, and then, with a swipe, erases them.
Response and Reconciliation
Dialogue with Francisco de Quevedo
I
Ah life! Does no one answer?
His words rolled, bolts of lightning etched
in years that were boulders and now are mist.
Life never answers.
It has no ears and doesn’t hear us;
it doesn’t speak, it has no tongue.
It neither goes nor stays:
we are the ones who speak,
the ones who go,
while we hear from echo to echo, year to year,
our words rolling through a tunnel with no end.
That which we call life
hears itself within us, speaks
with our tongues,
and through us, knows itself.
As we portray it, we become its mirror, we invent it.
An invention of an invention: it creates us
without knowing what it has created,
we are an accident that thinks.
It is a creature of reflections
we create by thinking,
and it hurls itself into fictitious abysses.
The depths, the transparencies
where it floats or sinks: not life, but its idea.
It is always on the other side and is always other,
has a thousand bodies and none,
never moves and never stops,
it is born to die, and is born at death.
Is life immortal? Don’t ask life,
for it doesn’t even know what life is.
We are the ones who know
that one day it too must die and return
to the beginning, the inertia of the origin.
The end of yesterday, today, and tomorrow,
the dissipation of time
and of nothing, its opposite.
Then—will there be a then?
will the primigenius spark
light the matrix of the worlds,
a perpetual re-beginning of a senseless whirling?
No one answers, no one knows.
We only know that to live is to live for.
II
Sudden spring, a girl who wakes
on a green bed guarded by thorns;
tree of noon, heavy with oranges:
your tiny suns, fruits of cool fire,
summer gathers them in transparent baskets;
the fall is severe, its cold light
sharpens its knife against the red maples;
Januaries and Februaries: their beards are ice,
and their eyes sapphires that April liquefies;
the wave that rises, the wave that stretches out,
appearances-disappearances
on the circular road of the year.
All that we see, all that we forget,
the harp of the rain, the inscription of the lightning,
the hurried thoughts, reflections turned to birds,
the doubts of the path as it meanders,
the wailing of the wind
as it carves the faces of the mountains,
the moon on tiptoe over the lake,