a waking

I was walled inside a dream.

Its walls had no consistency,

no weight: its emptiness was its weight.

The walls were hours and the hours

sorrow, hoarded forever.

The time of those hours was not time.

I leapt through a breach: in this world

it was four o’clock. The room was my room

and my ghost was in each thing.

I wasn't there. I looked out the window:

not a soul under the electric light.

Vigilant streetlamps, dirty snow,

houses and cars asleep, the insomnia

of a lamp, the oak that talks to itself,

the wind and its knives, the illegible

writing of the constellations.

The things were buried deep in themselves

and my eyes of flesh saw them

weary of being, realities

stripped of their names. My two eyes

were souls grieving for the world.

On the empty street the presence

passed without passing, vanishing

into its forms, fixed in its changes,

and turned now into houses, oaks, snow, time.

Life and death flowed on, blurred together.

Uninhabited sight, the presence

looked at me with nobody’s eyes:

a bundle of reflections over the cliffs.

I looked inside: the room was my room

and I wasn't there. Being lacks nothing

—always full of itself, always the same—

even though we are not there … Outside,

the clarities, still uncertain:

dawn in the jumble of the rooftops.

The constellations were being erased.

~ Octavio Paz

translated by Eliot Weinberger,

 from  A Tree Within

art by sara fairfax