life which makes us strangers

 

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

...

I heard my blood, singing in its prison,

and the sea sang with a murmur of light,

one by one the walls gave way,

all of the doors were broken down,

and the sun came bursting through my forehead,

it tore apart my closed lids,

cut loose my being from its wrappers,

and pulled me out of myself to wake me

from this animal sleep and its centuries of stone

~ Octavio Paz

from Sunstone/Piedra De Sol

the bridge

 

Between now and now

between I am and you are

the word bridge

Entering it

you enter yourself;

the world connects and closes like a ring.

From one bank to another

there is always a body stretched:

a rainbow.

I'll sleep between its arches.

~ Octavio Paz

with thanks to love is a place

photo by Paul King

fable - everyone was everything

 

 

 

Ages of fire and of air
Youth of water
From green to yellow
From yellow to red
From dream to watching
From desire to act
It was only one step and you took it so lightly
Insects were living jewels
The heat rested by the side of the pond
Rain was a willow with unpinned hair
A tree grew in the palm of your hand
And that tree laughed sang prophesied
Its divinations filled the air with wings
There were simple miracles called birds
Everything was for everyone
Everyone was everything
There was only one huge word with no back to it
A word like a sun
One day it broke into tiny pieces
They were the words of the language we now speak
Pieces that will never come together
Broken mirrors where the world sees itself shattered

 

 

 

 
 ~  Octavio Paz

 with thanks to whiskey river

 

 

 

where without whom

 

 

 

 

 

 There is not

a single soul among the trees.

and I

 don't know where I've gone.

~ Octavio Paz

 

 

a moment outside the moment

From birth to death time surrounds us

with its intangible walls.

We fall with the centuries, the years, the minutes.

Is time only a falling, only a wall?

For a moment, sometimes, we see

not with our eyes but with our thoughts

time resting in a pause.

The world half-opens and we glimpse

the immaculate kingdom,

the pure forms, presences

unmoving, floating

on the hour, a river stopped:

truth, beauty, numbers, ideas

and goodness, a word buried

in our century.

A moment without weight or duration,

a moment outside the moment:

thought sees, our eyes think.

~ Octavio Paz

between what I see and what I say

for Roman Jakobson

1

Between what I see and what I say,

Between what I say and what I keep silent,

Between what I keep silent and what I dream,

Between what I dream and what I forget:

poetry.

It slips

between yes and no,

says

what I keep silent,

keeps silent

what I say,

dreams

what I forget.

It is not speech:

it is an act.

It is an act

of speech.

Poetry

speaks and listens:

it is real.

And as soon as I say

it is real,

it vanishes.

Is it then more real?

2

Tangible idea,

intangible

word:

poetry

comes and goes

between what is

and what is not.

It weaves

and unweaves reflections.

Poetry

scatters eyes on a page,

scatters words on our eyes.

Eyes speak,

words look,

looks think.

To hear

thoughts,

see

what we say,

touch

the body of an idea.

Eyes close,

the words open.

~ Octavio Paz (1914-1998),

from A Tree Within, (Poems 1976-1987)

listen to me as one listens to the rain

Listen to me as one listens to the rain,

not attentive, not distracted,

light footsteps, thin drizzle,

water that is air, air that is time,

the day is still leaving,

the night has yet to arrive,

figurations of mist

at the turn of the corner,

figurations of time

at the bend in this pause,

listen to me as one listens to the rain,

without listening, hear what I say

with eyes open inward, asleep

with all five senses awake,

it’s raining, light footsteps, a murmur of syllables,

air and water, words with no weight:

what we are and are,

the days and years, this moment,

weightless time and heavy sorrow,

listen to me as one listens to the rain,

wet asphalt is shining,

steam rises and walks away,

night unfolds and looks at me,

you are you and your body of steam,

you and your face of night,

you and your hair, unhurried lightning,

you cross the street and enter my forehead,

footsteps of water across my eyes,

listen to me as one listens to the rain,

the asphalt’s shining, you cross the street,

it is the mist, wandering in the night,

it is the night, asleep in your bed,

it is the surge of waves in your breath,

your fingers of water dampen my forehead,

your fingers of flame burn my eyes,

your fingers of air open eyelids of time,

a spring of visions and resurrections,

listen to me as one listens to the rain,

the years go by, the moments return,

do you hear the footsteps in the next room?

not here, not there: you hear them

in another time that is now,

listen to the footsteps of time,

inventor of places with no weight, nowhere,

listen to the rain running over the terrace,

the night is now more night in the grove,

lightning has nestled among the leaves,

a restless garden adrift—go in,

your shadow covers this page.

~ Octavio Paz

 translation by Eliot Weinberger

a tree within

A tree grew inside my head.

A tree grew in.

Its roots are veins,

its branches nerves,

thoughts its tangles foliage.

Day breaks

in the body’s night.

There, within, inside my head,

the tree speaks.

Come closer—can you hear it?

~ Octavio Paz

translation by Eliot Weinberger
art by Leticia Alaniz

wind and water and stone

.

The water hollowed the stone,

the wind dispersed the water,

the stone stopped the wind.

Water and wind and stone.

The wind sculpted the stone,

the stone is a cup of water,

The water runs off and is wind.

Stone and wind and water.

The wind sings in its turnings,

the water murmurs as it goes,

the motionless stone is quiet.

Wind and water and stone.

One is the other and is neither:

among their empty names

they pass and disappear,

water and stone and wind. 

~ Octavio Paz

(Translated by Mark Strand, 

The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987)

motion

If you are the amber mare

I am the road of blood

If you are the first snow

I am he who lights the hearth of dawn

If you are the tower of night

I am the spike burning in your mind

If you are the morning tide

I am the first bird's cry

If you are the basket of oranges

I am the knife of the sun

If you are the stone altar

I am the sacrilegious hand

If you are the sleeping land

I am the green cane

If you are the wind's leap

I am the buried fire

If you are the water's mouth

I am the mouth of moss

If you are the forest of the clouds

I am the axe that parts it

If you are the profaned city

I am the rain of consecration

If you are the yellow mountain

I am the red arms of lichen

If you are the rising sun

I am the road of blood

~ Octavio Paz

translated by Eliot Weinberger, 

from Collected Poems 1957-1987 

response and reconciliation

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 into fictitious abysses.
The depths, the transparencies
where it floats or sinks: not life, 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 primogenious 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,
the breezes in gardens, the throbbing of night,
the camps of stars on the burnt field,
the battle of reflections on the white salt flats,
the fountain and its monologue,
the held breath of outstretched night
and the river that entwines it, the pine under the evening star
and the waves, instant statues, on the sea,
the flock of clouds that the wind herds
through drowsy valleys, the peaks, the chasms,
time turned to rock, frozen eras,
time maker of roses and plutonium,
time that makes as it razes.

The ant, the elephant, the spider, and the sheep,
our strange world of terrestrial creatures
that are born, eat, kill, sleep, play, couple,
and somehow know that they die;
our world of humanity, far and near,
the animal with eyes in its hands

that tunnels through the past and examines the future,
with its histories and uncertainties,
the ecstasy of the saint, the sophisms of the evil,
the elation of lovers, their meetings, their contentions,
the insomnia of the old man counting his mistakes,
the criminal and the just, a double enigma,
the Father of the People, his crematory parks,
his forests of gallows and obelisks of skulls,
the victorious and the defeated,
the long sufferings and the one happy moment,
the builder of houses and the one who destroys them,
this paper where I write, letter by letter,
which you glance at with distracted eyes,
all of them and all of it, all
is the work of time that begins and ends.



III

From birth to death time surrounds us
with its intangible walls.
We fall with the centuries, the years, the minutes.
Is time only a falling, only a wall?

For a moment, sometimes, we see
not with our eyes but with our thoughts-
time resting in a pause.
The world half-opens and we glimpse
the immaculate kingdom,
the pure forms, presences
unmoving, floating
on the hour, a river stopped:
truth, beauty, numbers, ideas
-and goodness, a word buried
in our century.

A moment without weight or duration,
a moment outside the moment:
thought sees, our eyes think.
Triangles, cubes, the sphere, the pyramid
and the other geometrical figures
thought and drawn by mortal eyes
but which have been here since the beginning,
are, still legible, the world, its secret writing,
the reason and the origin of the turning of things,
the axis of the changes, the unsupported pivot
that rests on itself, a reality without a shadow.

The poem, the piece of music, the theorem,
unpolluted presences born from the void,
are delicate structures
built over an abyss:
infinities fit into their finite forms,
and chaos too is ruled by their hidden symmetry.

Because we know it, we are not an accident:
chance, redeemed, returns to order.
Tied to the earth and to time,
a light and weightless ether,
thought supports the worlds and their weight,
whirlwinds of suns turned
into a handful of signs
on a random piece of paper.

Wheeling swarms
of transparent evidence
where the eyes of understanding
drink a water simple as water.

The universe rhymes with itself,
it unfolds and is two and is many
without ceasing to be one.

Motion, a river that runs endlessly
with open eyes through the countries of vertigo
-there is no above nor below, what is near is far--
returns to itself
-without returning, now turned
into a fountain of stillness.

Tree of blood, man feels, thinks, flowers,
and bears strange fruits: words.
What is thought and what is felt entwine,
we touch ideas: they are bodies and they are numbers.

And while I say what I say
time and space fall dizzyingly,
restlessly. They fall in themselves.
Man and the galaxy return to silence.

Does it matter? Yes--but it doesn't matter:
we know that silence is music and that
we are a chord in this concert.




–Octavio Paz
awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature.
Response and Reconciliation was the last poem he published
before his death on April 19,1998
translated by Eliot Weinberger

coda

Perhaps to love is to learn

to walk through this world.

To learn to be silent

like the oak and the linden of the fable.

To learn to see.

Your glance scattered seeds.

It planted a tree.

I talk

because you shake its leaves.

~ Octavio Paz

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

the bridge

Between now and now,
between I am and you are,
the word bridge.

Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring.

From one bank to another,
there is always
a body stretched:
a rainbow.
I’ll sleep beneath its arches.

~ Octavio Paz

from The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957-1987

as one listens to the rain

Listen to me as one listens to the rain,

not attentive, not distracted,

light footsteps, thin drizzle,

water that is air, air that is time,

the day is still leaving,

the night has yet to arrive,

figurations of mist

at the turn of the corner,

figurations of time

at the bend in this pause,

listen to me as one listens to the rain,

without listening, hear what I say

with eyes open inward, asleep

with all five senses awake,

it’s raining, light footsteps, a murmur of syllables,

air and water, words with no weight:

what we are and are,

the days and years, this moment,

weightless time and heavy sorrow,

listen to me as one listens to the rain,

wet asphalt is shining,

steam rises and walks away,

night unfolds and looks at me,

you are you and your body of steam,

you and your face of night,

you and your hair, unhurried lightning,

you cross the street and enter my forehead,

footsteps of water across my eyes,

listen to me as one listens to the rain,

the asphalt’s shining, you cross the street,

it is the mist, wandering in the night,

it is the night, asleep in your bed,

it is the surge of waves in your breath,

your fingers of water dampen my forehead,

your fingers of flame burn my eyes,

your fingers of air open eyelids of time,

a spring of visions and resurrections,

listen to me as one listens to the rain,

the years go by, the moments return,

do you hear the footsteps in the next room?

not here, not there: you hear them

in another time that is now,

listen to the footsteps of time,

inventor of places with no weight, nowhere,

listen to the rain running over the terrace,

the night is now more night in the grove,

lightning has nestled among the leaves,

a restless garden adrift—go in,

your shadow covers this page.

~ Octavio Paz

from A Tree Within

Eliot Weinberger translation

between

Between going and staying

the day wavers,

in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay

where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,

all is near and can’t be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,

rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats

the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall

into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,

watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,

I stay and go: I am a pause.

~ Octavio Paz

bridge

Between now and now,

between I am and you are,

the word bridge.

Entering it

you enter yourself:

the world connects

and closes like a ring.

From one bank to another,

there is always

a body stretched:

a rainbow.

I'll sleep beneath its arches.

~ Octavio Paz

brotherhood

I am a man: little do I last

and the night is enormous.

But I look up:

the stars write.

Unknowing I understand:

I too am written,

and at this very moment

someone spells me out.

~ Octavio Paz

I am the pause

Between going and staying the day wavers, 

in love with its own transparency. 

The circular afternoon is now a bay 

where the world in stillness rocks. 

All is visible and all elusive, 

all is near and can't be touched. 

Paper, book, pencil, glass, 

rest in the shade of their names. 

Time throbbing in my temples repeats 

the same unchanging syllable of blood. 

The light turns the indifferent wall 

into a ghostly theater of reflections. 

I find myself in the middle of an eye, 

watching myself in its blank stare. 

The moment scatters. Motionless, 

I stay and go: I am a pause.

~ Octavio Paz

photo by David Orndorf

interval

Instantaneous architectures

hanging over a pause,

apparitions neither named

nor thought, wind-forms,

insubstantial as time

and, like time, dissolved.

Made of time, they are not time;

they are the cleft, the interstice,

the brief vertigo of between

where the diaphanous flower opens:

high on its stalk of a reflection

it vanishes as it turns.

Never touched, the clarities

seen with the eyes closed:

transparent birth

and the crystalline fall

in the instant of this instant

that forever is still here.

Outside the window, the desolate

rooftops and the hurrying clouds.

The day goes out, the city

lights up, remote and near.

Weightless hour. I breathe

the moment, empty and eternal.

~ Octavio Paz

translation by Eliot Weinberger

with thanks again to growing-orbits