Lightning Rests

[from Octavio Paz’s Condición de Nube, 1944]

Stretched out,
stone made of noon,
eyes half shut where white turns blue,
smile half curled.
You almost rouse & toss your lion’s mane.
Then you stretch out,
thin streak of lava in rock,
sleeping ray.
While you sleep I stroke & polish you,
slender axe,
arrow I use to strike the night.

Far off the sea fights with swords & feathers.


Relámpago en reposo

Tendida,
piedra hecha de mediodía,
ojos entrecerrados donde el blanco azulea,
entornada sonrisa.
Te incorporas a medias y sacudes tu melena de león.
Luego te tiendes,
delgada estría de lava en la roca,
rayo dormido.
Mientras duermes te acaricio y te pulo,
hacha esbelta,
flecha con que incendio la noche.

El mar combate allá lejos con espadas y plumas.
<br>

Piedra del sol

[excerpt from Octavio Paz’s Piedra del sol, 1957]

. . .

oh, life to live & lived already,
time that repeats like an ocean swell
& retires without showing its face,
what was wasn’t but is
& silently spills
swiftly to disappear:

here on this afternoon of stone & saltpeter
armed with invisible steel
you ink my skin with indecipherable
red marks & those wounds
cover me like a suit of flames
I burn but endure, I search for water
& in your eyes there’s no water, they’re stone,
& your breasts, your belly, your hips
are stone, your mouth tastes of dust,
your mouth tastes like poisoned time,
your body tastes like a stopped-up well,
a mirrored passage repeating
your dried-out eyes, a passage
that always returns to its beginning,
& you lead me, blind, by my hand
through those neverending galleries
to the circle’s center & you levitate
coruscating, then jell to an axe,
like light that flays skin, compelling
as gallows for the doomed,
flexible as a whip & willowy
as a weapon that’s moon’s Gemini,
& your sharpened words gouge
my chest & unpeople & evacuate me,
one by one you strip my memories,
I’ve forgotten my name, my friends
grunt among pigs or rot away
in a ditch, devoured by sun,

I’m no more than a great wound,
a gap that no one crosses,
a present without windows, a thought
that returns, repeats, reflects
& loses way in its own transparency,
consciousness lanced by an eye
that watches itself watching until it drowns
in clarity

. . .

Proem

[Octavio Paz’s Proema from Árbol adentro, 1976-1987]

Proem

   Sometimes poetry is body vertigo & cheerful vertigo & fatal vertigo;
   the stroll with closed eyes at cliff’s edge & the rodeo in the submarine gardens;
   the smile igniting the rules & the sacred commandments;
   the descent of words parachuted onto the sands of the page;
   despair that boards a paper boat & floats,
   for forty nights & forty days, the sea of nighttime anguish & the rock of daytime anguish;
   self-idolatry & self-execration & self-dissipation;
   guillotining of epithets & burial of mirrors;
   recall of newly cut pronouns in the garden of Epicurus & the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;
   the flute's solo on memory’s mezzanine & the flame's tango in thinking’s subterrane;
   the myriad migrations of verbs, wings & claws, seeds & hands;
   the nouns, bony & root-bound, planted on waves of language;
   love to the never seen & love to the never heard & love to the never said: love to love.

Syllables seeds.

Trowbridge Street

[from Octavio Paz’s Return, 1969-1975]

Trowbridge Street

1

Sun inside the day
                              Cold inside the sun
Empty streets
                       parked cars
Still no snow
                     but wind wind
Stil burning
                     in the frozen air
a small red tree
I talk to it to talk to you

2

I’m in a room abandoned by language
You are in another identical room
Or both of us are
in a street that your looking has emptied
The world
imperceptibly dissolves
                                       Memory
collapsed beneath our feet
I’m stopped in the middle of this
unwritten line

3

Doors open & close by themselves
                                                        Air
enters & leaves our house
                                         Air
talks to itself to talk to you
                                             Nameless
air in the endless hall
I don’t know who is on the other side
                                                             Air
turns & turns in my empty skull
                                                    Air
turns air touches everything
                                             Air
with air-fingers dissipates what I say
I’m air you don’t see
I can’t open your eyes
                                    I can’t close the door
The air’s turned solid

4

This hour has the shape of a pause
The pause has your shape
You have a fountain’s shape
not water but time
On the tip of the spray
bits of me jump
what I was      what I am      what still I am not
My life weighs nothing
                                      The past thins
The future is some water in your eyes

5

Now you have the shape of a bridge
our room navigates under your arches
From your terrace we see ourselves pass
In the wind you waver more light than body
On the other bank the sun grows
                                                      backward
Its roots sink in the sky
We could hide in its foliage
With its branches build a bonfire
The day is habitable

6

Cold has immobilized the world
Space is glass
                       Glass is air
The slightest sounds build
sudden sculptures
The echo multiplies & scatters them
Perhaps it will snow
The burning tree trembles
already surrounded by night
Talking to it I talk to you