The Poems of Octavio Paz

  and drinks from itself, spilling over,

  the moment, translucent, seals itself off

  and ripens inward, sends out roots,

  grows within me, taking me over,

  its feverish leafing drives me away,

  my thoughts are nothing more than its birds,

  its mercury runs through my veins, tree

  of the mind, fruit that tastes of time,

  oh life to live, life already lived,

  time that comes back in a swell of sea,

  time that recedes without turning its head,

  the past is not past, it is still passing by,

  flowing silently into the next vanishing moment:

  in an afternoon of stone and saltpeter,

  armed with invisible razors you write

  in red illegible script on my skin,

  and the wounds dress me like a suit of flames,

  I burn without end, I search for water,

  in your eyes there’s no water, they’re made of stone,

  and your breasts, your belly, your hips are stone,

  your mouth tastes of dust, your mouth tastes

  like poisoned time, your body tastes

  like a well that’s been sealed, passage of mirrors

  where anxious eyes repeat, passage

  that always leads back to where it began,

  you take me, a blind man, led by the hand,

  through relentless galleries toward the center

  of the circle, and you rise like splendor

  hardened into an ax, like light that flays,

  engrossing as a gallows is to the doomed,

  flexible as whips and thin as a weapon

  that’s twin to the moon, your sharpened words

  dig out my chest, depopulate me

  and leave me empty, one by one

  you extract my memories, I’ve forgotten my name,

  my friends grunt in a wallow with the pigs

  or rot in ravines eaten by the sun,

  there is nothing inside me but a large wound,

  a hollow place where no one goes,

  a windowless present, a thought that returns

  and repeats itself, reflects itself,

  and loses itself in its own transparency,

  a mind transfixed by an eye that watches

  it watching itself till it drowns itself

  in clarity: I saw your horrid scales,

  Melusina, shining green in the dawn,

  you slept twisting between the sheets,

  you woke shrieking like a bird,

  and you fell and fell, till white and broken,

  nothing remained of you but your scream,

  and I find myself at the end of time

  with bad eyes and a cough, rummaging through

  the old photos: there’s no one, you’re no one,

  a heap of ashes and a worn-out broom,

  a rusted knife and a feather-duster,

  a pelt that hangs from a pack of bones,

  a withered branch, a black hole,

  and there at the bottom the eyes of a girl

  drowned a thousand years ago,

  glances buried deep in a well,

  glances that have watched us since the beginning,

  the girl’s glance of the aged mother

  who sees her grown son a young father,

  the mother’s glance of the lonely girl

  who sees her father a young son,

  glances that watch us from the depths

  of life, and are the traps of death

  —or what if that falling into those eyes

  were the way back to true life?

  to fall, to go back, to dream myself,

  to be dreamed by other eyes that will come,

  another life, other clouds,

  to die yet another death!

  —this night is enough, this moment that never

  stops opening out, revealing to me

  where I was, who I was, what your name is,

  what my name is: was it I making plans

  for the summer—and for all the summers—

  on Christopher Street, ten years ago,

  with Phyllis, who had two dimples in her cheeks

  where sparrows came to drink the light?

  on the Reforma did Carmen say to me,

  “the air’s so crisp here, it’s always October,”

  or was she speaking to another I’ve forgotten,

  or did I invent it and no one said it?

  in Oaxaca was I walking through a night

  black-green and enormous as a tree,

  talking to myself like the crazy wind,

  and reaching my room—always a room—

  was it true the mirrors didn’t know me?

  did we watch the dawn from the Hotel Vernet

  dancing with the chestnut trees—

  did you say “it’s late,” combing your hair,

  did I watch the stains on the wall and say nothing?

  did the two of us climb the tower together,

  did we watch evening fall on the reef?

  did we eat grapes in Bidart? in Perote

  did we buy gardenias? names, places,

  streets and streets, faces, plazas,

  streets, a park, stations, single

  rooms, stains on the wall, someone

  combing her hair, someone dressing,

  someone singing at my side, rooms,

  places, streets, names, rooms,

  Madrid, 1937,

  in the Plaza del Ángel the women were sewing

  and singing along with their children,

  then: the sirens’ wail, and the screaming,

  houses brought to their knees in the dust,

  towers cracked, facades spat out

  and the hurricane drone of the engines:

  the two took off their clothes and made love

  to protect our share of all that’s eternal,

  to defend our ration of paradise and time,

  to touch our roots, to rescue ourselves,

  to rescue the inheritance stolen from us

  by the thieves of life centuries ago,

  the two took off their clothes and kissed

  because two bodies, naked and entwined,

  leap over time, they are invulnerable,

  nothing can touch them, they return to the source,

  there is no you, no I, no tomorrow,

  no yesterday, no names, the truth of two

  in a single body, a single soul,

  oh total being . . . rooms adrift

  in the foundering cities, rooms and streets,

  names like wounds, the room with windows

  looking out on other rooms

  with the same discolored wallpaper,

  where a man in shirtsleeves reads the news

  or a woman irons; the sunlit room

  whose only guest is the branches of a peach;

  and the other room, where it’s always raining

  outside on the patio and the three boys

  who have rusted green; rooms that are ships

  that rock in a gulf of light; rooms

  that are submarines: where silence dissolves

  into green waves, and all that we touch

  phosphoresces; and the tombs of luxury,

  with their portraits nibbled, their rugs unraveling;

  and the traps, the cells, the enchanted grottoes,

  the bird cages and the numbered rooms,

  all are transformed, all take flight,

  every moulding is a cloud, every door

 
leads to the sea, the country, the open

  air, every table is set for a banquet;

  impenetrable as conches, time lays siege

  to them in vain, there is no more time,

  there are no walls: space, space,

  open your hand, gather these riches,

  pluck the fruit, eat of life,

  stretch out under the tree and drink!

  all is transformed, all is sacred,

  every room is the center of the world,

  it’s still the first night, and the first day,

  the world is born when two people kiss,

  a drop of light from transparent juices,

  the room cracks half-open like a fruit

  or explodes in silence like a star,

  and the laws chewed away by the rats,

  the iron bars of the banks and jails,

  the paper bars, the barbed wire,

  the rubber stamps, the pricks and goads,

  the droning one-note sermon on war,

  the mellifluous scorpion in a cap and gown,

  the top-hatted tiger, chairman of the board

  of the Red Cross and the Vegetarian Society,

  the schoolmaster donkey, the crocodile cast

  in the role of savior, father of the people,

  the Boss, the shark, the architect of the future,

  the uniformed pig, the favorite son

  of the Church who washes his blackened dentures

  in holy water and takes classes in civics

  and conversational English, the invisible walls,

  the rotten masks that divide one man

  from another, one man from himself, they crumble

  for one enormous moment and we glimpse

  the unity that we lost, the desolation

  of being man, and all its glories,

  sharing bread and sun and death,

  the forgotten astonishment of being alive;

  to love is to battle, if two kiss

  the world changes, desires take flesh,

  thoughts take flesh, wings sprout

  on the backs of the slave, the world is real

  and tangible, wine is wine, bread

  regains its savor, water is water,

  to love is to battle, to open doors,

  to cease to be a ghost with a number

  forever in chains, forever condemned

  by a faceless master; the world changes

  if two look at each other and see,

  to love is to undress our names:

  “let me be your whore” said Héloise,

  but he chose to submit to the law

  and made her his wife, and they rewarded him

  with castration; better the crime,

  the suicides of lovers, the incest committed

  by brother and sister like two mirrors

  in love with their likeness, better to eat

  the poisoned bread, adultery on a bed

  of ashes, ferocious love, the poisonous

  vines of delirium, the sodomite who wears

  a gob of spit for a rose in his lapel,

  better to be stoned in the plaza than to turn

  the mill that squeezes out the juice of life,

  that turns eternity into empty hours,

  minutes into prisons, and time into

  copper coins and abstract shit;

  better chastity, the invisible flower

  that rocks atop the stalks of silence,

  the difficult diamond of the holy saints

  that filters desires, satiates time,

  the marriage of quietude and motion,

  solitude sings within its corolla,

  every hour is a petal of crystal,

  the world strips off its masks,

  and at its heart, a transparent shimmer

  that we call God, nameless being

  who studies himself in the void, faceless

  being emerged from himself, sun

  of suns, plenitude of presences and names;

  I follow my raving, rooms, streets,

  I grope my way through corridors of time,

  I climb and descend its stairs, I touch

  its walls and do not move, I go back

  to where I began, I search for your face,

  I walk through the streets of myself

  under an ageless sun, and by my side

  you walk like a tree, you walk like a river,

  and talk to me like the course of a river,

  you grow like wheat between my hands,

  you throb like a squirrel between my hands,

  you fly like a thousand birds, and your laugh

  is like the spray of the sea, your head

  is a star between my hands, the world

  grows green again when you smile,

  eating an orange, the world changes

  if two, dizzy and entwined, fall

  on the grass: the sky comes down, trees

  rise, space becomes nothing but light

  and silence, open space for the eagle

  of the eye, the white tribe of clouds

  goes by, and the body weighs anchor,

  the soul sets sail, and we lose

  our names and float adrift in the blue

  and green, total time where nothing

  happens but its own, easy crossing,

  nothing happens, you’re quiet, you blink,

  (silence: just now an angel crossed,

  huge as the life of a hundred suns),

  is nothing happening, only a blink?

  —and the banquet, the exile, the first crime,

  the jawbone of the ass, the opaque thud

  and the startled glance of the dead falling

  on an ash-strewn plain, Agamemnon’s

  great bellow, the screams of Cassandra,

  over and over, louder than the sea,

  Socrates in chains (the sun rises,

  to die is to wake: “Crito, a cock

  for Aesculapius, I am cured of life”),

  the jackal discoursing in the ruins of Nineveh,

  the shade that appeared to Brutus on the eve

  of the battle, Moctezuma insomniac

  on his bed of thorns, the ride in the carriage

  toward death—the interminable ride,

  counted minute by minute by Robespierre,

  his broken jaw between his hands,

  Churruca on his cask like a scarlet throne,

  the numbered steps of Lincoln as he left

  for the theater, Trotsky’s death-rattle

  and his howl like a boar, Madero’s gaze

  that no one returned: why are they killing me?,

  and the curses, the sighs, the silence

  of the criminal, the saint, the poor devil,

  graveyards of anecdotes and phrases scratched up

  by rhetorical dogs, the animal who’s dying

  and knows it, the useless common knowledge,

  the dark sound of the falling stone, the monotonous

  sound of bones being crushed in the fray

  and the foaming mouth of the prophet

  and his scream and the scream of the hangman

  and the scream of the victim . . . eyes are flames,

  what they see is flames, the ear a flame

  and sounds a flame, lips are coals,

  the tongue is a poker, touch and the touched,

  thought and the thought-of, he who thinks

  is flame, all is burning, the universe

  is flame, the nothing is burning, the nothing

  that is only a thought in flames, and noth
ing

  in the end but smoke: there is no victim,

  there is no hangman . . . and the cry on Friday

  afternoon?, and the silence covered in signs,

  the silence that speaks without ever speaking,

  does it say nothing? are cries nothing?

  does nothing happen as time passes by?

  —nothing happens, only a blink

  of the sun, nothing, barely a motion,

  there is no redemption, time can never

  turn back, the dead are forever

  fixed in death and cannot die

  another death, they are untouchable,

  frozen in a gesture, and from their solitude,

  from their death, they watch us,

  helpless, without ever watching,

  their death is now a statue of their life,

  an eternal being eternally nothing,

  every minute is eternally nothing,

  a ghostly king rules over your heartbeat

  and your final expression, a hard mask

  is formed over your changing face:

  the monument that we are to a life,

  unlived and alien, barely ours,

  —when was life ever truly ours?

  when are we ever what we are?

  we are ill-reputed, nothing more

  than vertigo and emptiness, a frown in the mirror,

  horror and vomit, life is never

  truly ours, it always belongs to the others,

  life is no one’s, we all are life—

  bread of the sun for the others,

  the others that we all are—,

  when I am I am another, my acts

  are more mine when they are the acts

  of others, in order to be I must be another,

  leave myself, search for myself

  in the others, the others that don’t exist

  if I don’t exist, the others that give me

  total existence, I am not,

  there is no I, we are always us,

  life is other, always there,

  further off, beyond you and

  beyond me, always on the horizon,

  life which unlives us and makes us strangers,

  that invents our face and wears it away,

  hunger for being, oh death, our bread,

  Mary, Persephone, Héloise, show me

  your face that I may see at last

  my true face, that of another,

  my face forever the face of us all,

  face of the tree and the baker of bread,

  face of the driver and the cloud and the sailor,

  face of the sun and face of the stream,

  face of Peter and Paul, face

  of this crowd of hermits, wake me up,

  I’ve already been born: life and death

  make a pact within you, lady of night,