The Poems of 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