SELECTED POEMS

FPT ISBN Q-flllE-003 2 >$1M-

OCTAVIO

SELECTED POEMS
Edited with an introduction
by Eliot Weinberger
Octavio Paz, asserts Eliot Weinberger in
his introduction to these Selected Poems, is among the last of the modernists
who drew their own maps of the worid.
For Latin Americas foremost living poet,
his native Mxico has been the center
of a global mandala, a cultural configu
raron that, in his life and work, he has
traced to its furthest reaches: to Spain,
as a young Marxist during the Civil War;
to San Francisco and New York in the
early 1940s; to Paris, as a surrealist, in
the postwar years; to India and Japan in
1952, and to the East again as his countrys ambassador to India from 1962 to
1968; and to various universities in the
United States throughout the 1970s.
A great synthesizer, the rich diversity
of Pazs thought is shown here in all
its astonishing complexity. Among the
(continued on back flap)

A NEW DIRECTIQNS BOOK

Paz, Octavio
Selected poems
861 PAZ

00900 9562

SAUSALITO PUBLIC LIBRARY

SXUSALTTO PUBLIC LJBRSK1

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2012

http://archive.org/details/selectedpoemsOOpazo

OCTAVIO PAZ
Selected Poems

Also by Octavio Paz

Configurations
Early Poems 1935-1955
Eagle or Sun?
A Draft of Shadows

OCTAVIO PAZ
Selected Poems

Edited by e l i o t

w e in b e r g e r

T ranslations f r o m the Spanish b y g . a r o u l ,

ELIZABETH BISHOP, PAUL BLACKBURN, LYSANDER KEMP,
DENISE LEVERTOV, MURIEL RUKEYSER, MARK STRAND,
CHARLES TOMLINSON, WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS,
M o n i q u e f o n g w u s t , and the editor

A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

S5SLITO PUBLIC

LIBRAR*

Copyright 1959 by Octavio Paz and Jean Miller Blackburn

Copyright 1959, 1965 by Octavio Paz and Denise Levertov Goodman
Copyright 1963, 1973 by Octavio Paz and Muriel Rukeyser
Copyright 1967 by Octavio Paz and Lysander Kemp
Copyright 1968 by Octavio Paz and Charles Tomlinson
Copyright 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1979 by Octavio Paz and
Eliot Weinberger
Copyright 1970 by Octavio Paz and Paul Blackburn
Copyright 1971 by New Directions Publishing Corporation
Copyright 1973 by Octavio Paz and Florence H. Williams
Copyright 1974 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
Copyright 1984 by Eliot Weinberger
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or
televisin review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
The Spanish texts from which the translations in this volume were made are included in
Octavio Pazs Poemas (1935-1975) (Copyright 1979 by Octavio Paz), Edition 1979
Editorial Seix Barral, S. A. Most of the translations have been selected from Configurations (1971), Early Poerns 1935-1955 (1973), Eagle or Sun? (1976), and A Draft of
Shadows (1979), all published by New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published clothbound and as New Directions Paperback 574 in 1984
Published simultaneously in Caada by George J. McLeod, Ltd., Toronto
Library o f C ongress C ataloging in P u biication D ata
Paz, Octavio, 1914Selected poems.
(A New Directions Book)
1. Paz, Octavio, 1914Translations, English.
I. Weinberger, Eliot. II. Aroul, G. III. Title.
PQ7297.P285A29 1984
861
84-9856
ISBN 0-8112-0903-2
ISBN 0-8112-0899-0 (pbk.)
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

Contents
Introduction

ix

from BAJO TU CLARA

(1935-1944)
The bird 1
Two bodies 2
Poets epitaph 2

som bra/

U n d e r YOUR CLEAR s h a d o w

from CALAMIDADES Y M ILAGROS/CALAMITIES AND MIRACLES

(1937-1947)
The Street
2

from SEMILLAS PARA UN H IM N O /SEEDS FOR A PSALM

(1943-1955)
The hand of day opens
Fable
3
Native stone 4
Object lesson
5
In Uxmal
7
Riprap
8

from AGUILA O SO L ?/EAGLE OR SUN? (1949-1950)

The poets works III,

The blue bouquet
Hurry
14
Plain
16
Capital 16
Obsidian butterfly
A poet
19
Huastec lady
19
Toward the poem

IV, VII, XI, XII

12

10

17
20

from LA ESTACION VIOLENTA/' THE VIOLENT SEASON (1948-1957)

Hymn among the ruins 22

Is there no way out? 24

The river
Sun stone

27
29

from DIAS HABILES/ LAWFUL DAYS (1958-1961)

Dawn 46
He re
46
Landscape 46
Certainty 47

from

salam an dra/

from

ladera

Touch 48
Duration 48
Last dawn 49
Salamander 50

SALa m a n d e r

(1958-1961)

ESTE/' EAST s l o p e (1962-1968)

Happiness in Herat 55
Apparition 57
In the Lodi gardens 57
The other 58
Vrindaban 58
Village 63
Daybreak 63
Nightfall 64
On reading John Cage 64
Writing 67
Concord 68
Exclamation 68

from HACIA EL COM IENZO/TOWARD THE BEGINNING (1964-1968)

Wind from all compass points 69

Madrigal 74
With eyes closed 75
Transit 75
Maithuna 76
The key of water 80
Sunday on the island of Elephanta 80
blanco

Blanco

(1966)
82

from v u e l t a / r e t u r n (1969-1975)

The grove 92
Immemorial landscape 93
Trowbridge Street
95
Objects and apparitions
Return 99
In the middle of this phrase . . .
The petrifying petrified
San Ildefonso nocturne

97
103

PASADO EN CLARO/ A DRAFT OF SHADOWS

A draft of shadows

120

UNCOLLECTED POEMS (1976-1980)

Fame, speech 138
Sight, touch 139
Homage to Claudius Ptolemy 140
Stars and cricket 141
Wind and water and stone 141
Epitaph for no stone 142
This side 142

Authors notes

143

107
112
(1974)

Introduction
Mxico, perhaps more than China, is the M iddle Kingdom.
In the current political moment, its centrality lies on a northsouth axis: for North Americans, as the relatively stable,
partially friendly buffer state between us and the turmoil we
m isunderstand in Central America; for Mexicans, as a nation
placed between the closingjaws of Northern imperialism and
Southern revolt.
Historically, however, Mxico was a M iddle Kingdom be
tween the oceans, between East and West. Before the arrival of
Cortez in 1519 the country was, it seems likely, the eastern
edge of the transpacific cultural networkone that will never
be fully known, but which is apparent in various artworks across
the ocean: China, Japan, and India; Polynesia; Mxico, Per,
and Ecuador. W ith Cortez, of course, Mxico became the
western end of the Spanish Empire, with a European language
and religin, and with a government no more enlightened than
its Aztec predecessor.
There is a navel (xi, in Nahuatl) in the middle of the word
Mxico, and the navel of the M iddle Kingdom was the city
Tenochtitln, todays Mxico City, built literally on the water,
but facing no sea. It was the capital of an empire that radiated
from its ring of volcanoes and pyramids: an expanding selfabsorbed sun, devoted to feeding, with art and blood, the
other, celestial sun.
Mxicoa xenophobe whom strangers wont leave alone
has been the center of a global mandala. It is this configuration that Octavio Paz has, in his life and in the work,
traced to its furthest reaches. A great synthesizer, he has transformed the picture while simultaneously drawing his own selfportrait.
Born in a suburb of Mxico City in 1914, Paz began at the
center and followed the Mexican m andala in three directions.
East: as a young Marxist to the Spanish Civil W ar, and as a
surrealist to Paris in the late 1940s. North: to San Francisco
and New York during the Second W orld War, and in the 1970s
to various American universities. West: to India and Japan in
IX

1952, and as the M exican ambassador to India from 1962 to

1968.
From the U.S. he gained a visin of overdevelopment and a
view of his own country on the outskirts of history and the
pathos of its nationalistic ardor. From Europe, the belief in
poetry as the secret religin of the modern age ; that the
revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that
both cannot exist without a revolution of the body: life as art, a
return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and
nature, I and the other. From India, and his studies of Buddhism
and Tantrism: the revelation of passion binding the world in
illusion, and of passion as the liberator of the world: that in the
moment of absolute integration, the world dissolves, transparency is all that remains.
He is a man in love with silence who cant stop talking, a
restless mind, forever curious, in seemingly perpetual motion.
There is something Aztec in this, despite that societys bloody
singlemindedness and rigidity: In N ahuatl, the artist is tlayolteuanni, he who sees with his heart. Heart, yollotl, comes from
the word movement, ollin. Living hearts were flung down the
steps of the temples to feed the sun, to keep it moving. Time
was a turning wheel, the familiar sun stone. For the Aztecs, the
great terror was stasis that the sun, time, the world would stop.
Pazs mobility, though of course the product of an individual
temperament, oddly fits the ancient scheme. H ad he been born
in Tenochtitln, he might have been one of the poet-princes,
but I imagine him as a pochteca, one of that mysterious band of
pilgrims who wandered the empire in search of the Land of
the Sun.
Paz is generally read as Latin Americas great surrealist
poetthat is, as an exotic European. Yet he remains inherently
Mexican, despite the fact that he has always been a cosmopolitan and never a regionalist or an indigenist. Like the hero of a
Sufi parable, Paz traveled abroad to find what was always at
home. He discovered synesthesia in R im bauds colored vowels,
not in the Aztec painted songs. He practiced dissolving the
poets ego through automatic writing and Japanese renga, but
he carne from a tradition that did not distinguish between poet
and poem, where the poet declared, God has sent me as a
messenger./I am transformed into a poem.

The famous last line of Hymn among the Ruins, words

that are flowers that are fruits that are acts, could have been
written equally by a surrealist or by a member of the Aztec
Brotherhood of poets. In the N ahuatl lyric form called xopancuicatl, a celebration of life and of cyclical time, the poet and
the poem become a plant that grows with the poem; the plant
becomes the fibers of the book in which the poem is painted;
and the fibers of the book become the woven fiber of the mat,
the symbol ofworldly power and authority. Pazs preoccupation
with pairs is also strangely Nahuatl: The Aztecs tended to
describe the world by two aspectspoetry was flower and
song, fame mist and smoke, pleasure wind and heat so
that, as Angel Garibay writes, through the unin of these
two will come a spark which will bring understanding.
Pazs great Tantric poem Blanco owes much to MaUarm
and to Pounds ideogrammic m ethodeach image selfcontained and discrete, understood (like the Chinese ideogram
itself) only in relation to the other lines, written and unwritten;
each a centripetal forc drawing the other images and meanings
toward it, an implosion that leads to the explosion of the
poem. Yet Blanco was also designed as an Aztec book, a
folded screen. Those screens of painted songs, images rather
than what we would cali writing, were read as mnemonic
devices: the reader created the text, the text created itself, as
Blanco with its variant readings intends.
The surrealists sought a way out of European rationalism
and bourgeois capitalist vales by recovering their own archaic
history and by immersing themselves in the surviving indigenous cultures of the world. Paz, on a similar questto free
himself from the straitjacket of ex-colonial provincialism, that
child more orthodox than its parentwent to Europe to discover the other, heretical and subterranean, European tradition. It is an irony of the age: while Paz was writing on de Sade
and Fourier, his friend the French poet Benjamn Peret was
translating the M ayan Book of the Chilam Balam o f ChurnayeL
The surrealist m otto liberty, love and poetry applies
in varying degrees to most of the modernists of the first half o f
the century: women and men dedicated to the imagination, to
social revolution, to the transformation of all the arts, to the
integration of life and art. It seems incredible that that era has
XI

passed, that we have entered an age of specialized arts practitioners. Surely others will come, but at the moment Paz is
among the last of the poets who drew their own maps of the
world.
To read all that Paz has written would probably take a few
years; to absorb it, a few lifetimes. The latest edition of his
collected (not complete) poems alone filis some 700 pages. The
selection here is largely derived from the four previous New
Directions collections (Early Poems, Configurations, Eagle or Sun?,
and A Draft of Shadows). Some of the translations, however,
have never appeared in book form, including the long poem
M aithuna and the present versin of Blanco. In most
cases the poems chose themselves; Paz advised, but I must take
the blame for the final selection.
For Paz, forever in motion, there is no definitive text. His
tendency to revise his earlier work has even caused one academic critic to complain that Paz does not respect his own
poems. The present translations have been revised from the
earlier volumes to correspond to the most recent versions of the
poems, those published in the Seix Barral edition Poemas
(1935-1975). W here available, the original translators have
made the revisions. W ith the translations of Paul Blackburn,
M uriel Rukeyser, and W illiam Carlos Williams, this was,
sadly, not possible. I have, with reluctance, slightly altered
some of their translations. These changes, signaled in the notes,
involved deleting or adding a few lines or words. In no instance
have I attem pted to improve a translation, changing the
English where the Spanish has not changed. Nevertheless,
students of Blackburn, Rukeyser, and Williams should refer to
the original translations, all of which remain in print.
Special thanksagain and alwaysto Peter Glassgold at
New Directions and to Octavio Paz.
E lio t W ein ber g er

The bird
In transparent silence
day was resting:
the transparency of space
was silences transparency.
Motionless light of the sky was soothing
the growth of the grass.
Small things of earth, among the stones,
under identical light, were stones
Time sated itself in the minute.
And in an absorbed stillness
noonday consumed itself.
And a bird sang, slender arrow.
The sky shivered a wounded silver breast,
the leaves moved,
and grass awoke.
And I knew that death was an arrow
let fly from an unknown hand
and in the flicker of an eye we die.

[M .R.]

Two bodies
Two bodies face to face
are at times two waves
and night is an ocean.
Two bodies face to face
are at times two stones
and night a desert.
1

Two bodies face to face

are at times two roots
laced into night.
Two bodies face to face
are at times two knives
and night strikes sparks.
Two bodies face to face
are two stars falling
in an empty sky.

[M .R.]

Poets epitaph
He tried to sing, singing
not to remember
his true life of lies
and to remember
his lying life of truths.

The

Street

A long and silent Street.

I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall
and rise, and I walk blind, my feet
stepping on silent stones and dry leaves.
Someone behind me also stepping on stones, leaves:
if I slow down, he slows;
if I run, he runs. I turn: nobody.
2

[M .R.]

Everything dark and doorless.

Turning and turning among these corners
which lead forever to the Street
where nobody waits for, nobody follows me,
where I pursue a man who stumbles
and rises and says when he sees me: nobody

[M .R.]

(Untitled)
The hand of day opens
Three clouds
And these few words

[M .R.]

Fable
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
3

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

[E.W.]

Native stone
For Roger Munier

Light is laying waste the heavens

Droves of dominions in stampede
The eye retreats surrounded by mirrors
Landscapes enormous as insomnia
Stony ground of bone
Limitless autum n
Thirst lifts its invisible fountains
One last peppertree preaches in the desert
Cise your eyes and hear the light singing:
Noon nests in your inner ear
Cise your eyes and open them:
There is nobody not even yourself
W hatever is not stone is light

[M .R.]

Object lesson
1. ANIM ATION

Over the bookcase

between a T ang musician and a Oaxaca pitcher
incandescent, lively,
with glittering eyes of silver-paper
watching us come and go
the little sugar skull.
2. MASK OF TLALOC CARVED IN TR ANSPARENT
Q UARTZ

Petrified waters.
Od Tlaloc sleeps, within,
dreaming rainstorms.
3. THE SAME

Touched by light
quartz has become cascade.
Upon its waters floats the child, the god.
4. GOD W HO COM ES FORTH FROM A CERAM IC ORCHID

Among clay petis

is born, smiling,
the hum an flower.
5. OLMEC GODDESS

The four cardinal points

are gathered in your navel.
In your womb the day is pounding, fully armed.

6. CALENDAR

Facing water, days of fire.

Facing fire, days of water.
7. XOCHIPILLI

In a days tree
hang jade fruit,
fire and blood at night.
8. CROSS W ITH SUN AND M O O N PAINTED O N IT

Between the arms of this cross

two birds made their nest:
Adam, sun, and Eve, moon.
9. BOY AND TOP

Each time he spins it,

it lands, precisely,
at the center of the world.
10. OBJECTS

They live alongside us,

we do not know them, they do not know us.
But sometimes they speak with us.

[M .R.]

In Uxmal
I. THE STONE OF TH E DAYS

In the court, the sun stone, immobile;

above, the sun of fire and of time turns;
movement is sun and the sun is stone.

[E.W.]

2. NOON

Light unblinking,
time empty of minutes,
a bird stopped short in air.
3. LATER

Light lung down,

the pillars awake
and, without moving, dance.
4. FULL SUN

The time is transparent:

even if the bird is invisible,
let us see the color of his song.
5. RELIEFS

The rain, dancing, long-haired,

ankles slivered by lightning,
descends, to an accompaniment of drums:
the corn opens its eyes, and grows.

6. SERPENT CARVED ON A WALL

The wall in the sun breathes, shivers, ripples,

a live and tattooed fragment of the sky:
a man drinks sun and is water, is earth.
And over all that life the serpent
carrying a head between his jaws:
the gods drink blood, the gods eat man.

Riprap
1. FLOWER

Cry, barb, tooth, howls,

carnivorous nothingness, its turbulence,
all disappear before this simple lower.
2. SHE

Every night she goes down to the well

next m orning reappearing
with a new reptile in her arms.
3. BIOGRAPHY

Not what he might have been:

but what he was.
And what he was is dead.
4. BELLS IN THE NIGHT

Waves of shadows, waves of blindness

on a forehead in llames:
water for my thought, drown it out!
8

[M .R.]

5. AT THE DOOR

People, words, people.

I hesitated:
up there the moon, alone.
6. VISION

I saw myself when I shut my eyes:

space, space
where I am and am not.
7. LANDSCAPE

Insects endlessly busy,

horses the color of sun,
donkeys the color of cloud,
clouds, huge rocks that weigh nothing,
mountains like tilted skies,
a flock of trees drinking at the stream,
they are all there, delighted in being there,
and here we are not who are not,
eaten by fury, by hatred,
by love eaten, by death.

[M .R.]

8. ILLITERATE

I raised my face to the sky,

that huge stone of worn-out letters,
but the stars told me nothing.

[E.W.]

from The poets works

III

Everyone had left the house. Around eleven I noticed that I

had smoked my last cigarette. Not wanting to expose myself to
the wind and coid, I searched every cranny for a pack, without
success. There was nothing to do but put on my overcoat and
go downstairs (I live on the fifth floor). The Street, a beautiful
Street with tall buildings of gray stone and two rows of bare
chestnut trees, was deserted. I walked about three hundred
yards against the freezing wind and yellowish fog only to find
the shop closed. I turned toward a nearby caf where I was sure
to find a little warm th, some music, and above all cigarettes,
the object of my search. I walked two more blocks, shivering,
when suddenly I feltno, I didnt feel it: it passed, quickly: the
W ord. The unexpectedness of the meeting paralyzed me for a
second, long enough to give it time to return into the night.
Recovered, I reached and grabbed it by the tips of its Ooating
hair. I pulled desperately at those threads thatstretched toward
the infinite, telegraph wires that inevitably recede in a glimpsed
landscape, a note that rises, tapers ofF, stretches out, stretches
out . . . I was alone in the middle of the Street, with a red
feather between my livid hands.
IV

Lying on my bed, I crave the brute sleep, the m ummys sleep. I

cise my eyes and try not to hear that tapping in some crner of
the room. Silence is full of noise, and what you hear, I say to
myself, you do not truly hear. You hear the silence. And the
tapping contines, louder each time: it is the sound of horses
hooves galloping on a field of stone; it is an ax that cannot fell a
giant tree; a printing press printing a single immense verse
made up of nothing but one syllable that rhymes with the beat
of my heart; it is my heart that pounds the rock and covers it
with a ragged coat of foam; it is the sea, the undertow of the
chained sea that falls and rises, that rises and falls, that falls
and rises; it is the great trowels of silence falling in the silence.
10

VII

I write on the glimmering table, my pen resting heavily on its

chest that is almost living, that moans and remembers the
forest of its birth. G reat wings of black ink open. The lamp
explodes and a cape of broken glass covers my words. A sharp
sliver of light cuts off my right hand. I keep writing with this
stump that sprouts shadows. Night enters the room, the opposite
wall puckers its big stone lips, great blocks of air come between
my pen and the paper. A simple monosyllable would be enough
to make the world burst. But tonight there is no room for a
single word more.
XI

It hovers, creeps in, comes cise, withdraws, turns on tiptoe

and, if I reach out my hand, disappears: a Word. I can only
make out its proud crest: Cri. Cricket, Cripple, Crime, Crimea,
Critic, Crisis, Criterion? A canoe sails from my forehead
carrying a man armed with a spear. The light, fragile boat
nimbly cuts the black waves, the swells of black blood in my
temples. It moves further inward. The hunter-fisherman studies
the shaded, cloudy mass of a horizon full of threats; he sinks his
keen eyes into the rancorous foam, he perks his head and
listens, he sniffs. At times a bright flash crosses the darkness, a
green and scaly flutter. It is Cri, who leaps for a second into the
air, breathes, and submerges again in the depths. The hunter
blows the horn he carries strapped to his chest, but its mournful
bellow is lost in the desert of water. There is no one on the great
salt lake. And the rocky beach is far o, far o the faint lights
from the huts of his companions. From time to time Cri reappears, shows his fatal fin, and sinks again. The oarsman,
fascinated, follows him inward, each time further inward.
XII

After chopping o all the arms that reached out to me; after
boarding up all the windows and doors; after filling all the pits
with poisoned water; after building my house on the rock of a
No inaccessible to flattery and fear; after cutting out my tongue
and eating it; after hurling handfuls of silence and mono11

syHables of scorn at my loves; after forgetting my ame and the

ame of my birthplace and the ame of my race; after judging
and sentencing myself to perpetual waiting and perpetual
loneliness, I heard against the stones of my dungeon of syllogisms the humid, tender, insistent onset of spring.
[E.W.]

The blue bouquet

I woke covered with sweat. Hot steam rose from the newly
sprayed, red-brick pavement. A gray-winged butterfly, dazzled,
circled the yellow light. I jum ped from my hammock and
crossed the room barefoot, careful not to step on some scorpion
leaving his hideout for a bit of fresh air. I went to the little
window and inhaled the country air. One could hear the
breathing of the night, feminine, enormous. I returned to the
center of the room, emptied water from a jar into a pewter
basin, and wet my towel. I rubbed my chest and legs with the
soaked cloth, dried myself a little, and, making sure that no
bugs were hidden in the folds of my clothes, got dressed. I ran
down the green stairway. At the door of the boardinghouse I
bumped into the owner, a one-eyed taciturn fellow. Sitting on
a wicker stool, he smoked, his eye halfclosed. In a hoarse voice,
he asked:
W here are you going?
To take a walk. Its too hot.
H m m m everythings closed. And no streetlights around
here. Youd better stay put.
I shrugged my shoulders, m uttered back soon, and plunged
into the darkness. At first I couldnt see anything. I fumbled
along the cobblestone Street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the
moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white
wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such
whiteness. W ind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the
tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects.
12

Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up

there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe
was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings.
My actions, the crickets saw, the stars blink, were nothing but
pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue.
W hat word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who
speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette
down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting
out brief sparks like a tiny comet.
I walked a long time, slowly. I felt free, secure between the
lips that were at that moment speaking me with such happiness.
The night was a garden of eyes. As I crossed the Street, I heard
someone come out of a doorway. I turned around, but could
not distinguish anything. I hurried on. A few moments later I
heard the dull shufle of sandals on the hot stone. I didnt want
to turn around, although I felt the shadow getting closer with
every step. I tried to run. I couldnt. Suddenly I stopped short.
Before I could defend myself, I felt the point of a knife in my
back, and a sweet voice:
Dont move, mister, or Fll stick it in.
W ithout turning, I asked:
W hat do you want?
Your eyes, mister, answered the soft, almost painful voice.
My eyes? W hat do you want with my eyes? Look, Fve got
some money. Not much, but its something. Fll give you every
thing I have if you let me go. Dont kill me.
Dont be afraid, mister. I wont kill you. Im only going to
take your eyes.
But why do you want my eyes? I asked again.
My girlfriend has this whim. She wants a bouquet of blue
eyes. And around here theyre hard to find.
My eyes wont help you. Theyre brown, not blue.
Dont try to fool me, mister. I know very well that yours are
blue.
Dont take the eyes of a fellow man. Fll give you something
else.
Dont play saint with me, he said harshly. T urn around.
I turned. He was small and fragile. His palm sombrero
covered half his face. In his right hand he held a field machete
that shone in the moonlight.
13

 Let me see your face.

I struck a m atch and put it cise to my face. The brightness
made me squint. He opened my eyelids with a firm hand. He
couldnt see very well. Standing on tiptoe, he stared at me
intensely. The am e burned my fingers. I dropped it. A silent
moment passed.
Are you convinced now? Theyre not blue.
Pretty clever, arent you? he answered. Lets see. Light
another one.
I struck another match, and put it near my eyes. G rabbing
my sleeve, he ordered:
Kneel down.
I knelt. W ith one hand he grabbed me by the hair, pulling
my head back. He bent over me, curious and tense, while his
machete slowly dropped until it grazed my eyelids. I closed my
eyes.
Keep them open, he ordered.
I opened my eyes. The blame burned my lashes. All of a
sudden, he let me go.
All right, theyre not blue. Beat it.
He vanished. I leaned against the wall, my head in my
hands. I pulled myself together. Stumbling, falling, trying to
get up again, I ran for an hour through the deserted town.
W hen I got to the plaza, I saw the owner of the boardinghouse,
still sitting in front of the door. I went in without saying a
word. The next day I left town.
[E.W.]

Hurry
In spite of my torpor, my pufy eyes, my paunch, my appearance of having just left the cave, I never stop. Im in a
hurry. Ive always been in a hurry. Day and night a bee buzzes
in my brain. I jum p from m orning to night, sleep to waking,
crowds to solitude, dawn to dusk. Its useless that each of the
14

four seasons offers me its opulent table; useless the canarys

morning flourish, the bed lovely as a river in summer, that
adolescent and her tear, cut oT at the end of autum n. In vain
the noon sun and its crystal stem, the green leaves that filter it,
the rocks that deny it, the shadows that it sculpts. All of these
splendors just speed me up. Im oT and back, cough and hack,
I spin in a grin, I stomp, Im out, Im in, I snoop, I hear a ute,
Im deep in my mind, I itch, opine, malign, I change my suit, I
say adieu to what I was, I linger longer in what will be.
Nothing stops me. Im in a hurry, Im going. Where? I dont
know, know nothingexcept that Im not where I should be.
From when I First opened my eyes Ive known that my place
isnt here where I am, but where Im not and never have been.
Somewhere theres an empty place, and that emptiness will be
filled with me and Fll sit in that hole that will senselessly teem
with me, bubble with me until it turns into a fountain or a
geyser. And then my emptiness, the emptiness of the me that I
now am, will fill up with itself, full to the brim with being.
Im in a hurry to be. I run behind myself, behind my place,
behind my hole. Who has reserved this place for me? W hat is
my fates ame? W ho and what is that which moves me and
who and what awaits my arrival to complete itself and to
complete me? I dont know. Im in a hurry. Though I dont
move from my chair, though I dont get out of bed. Though I
turn and turn in my cage. Nailed by a ame, a gesture, a tic, I
move and remove. This house, these friends, these countries,
these hands, this mouth, these letters that form this image that
without warning has come unstuck from I dont know where
and has hit me across the chest, these are not my place. Neither
this or that is my place.
All that sustains me and that I sustain sustaining myself is a
screen, a wall. My hurry leaps all. This body offers me its body,
this sea puls from its belly seven waves, seven nudes, seven
whitecaps, seven smiles. I thank them and hurry off. Yes, the
walk has been amusing, the conversation instructive, its still
early, the function isnt over, and in no way do I pretend to
know the end. Im sorry: Im in a hurry. Im anxious to get rid
of my hurry. Im in a hurry to go to bed and to get up without
saying: good-by Im in a hurry.
[E.W.]
15

Plain
The anthill erupts. The open wound gushes, foams, expands,
contracts. The sun at these times never stops pum ping blood,
temples swollen, face red. A boyunaware that, in some crner
of puberty, fevers and a problem of conscience await him
carefully places a small stone on the flayed m outh of the
anthill. The sun buries its lances in the humps of the plain,
crushing promontories of garbage. Splendor unsheathed, the
reflections from an empty canhigh on a pyram id of scraps
pierce every point of space. Treasure-hunting children and
stray dogs poke in the yellow radiance of the rot. A thousand
feet away, the church of San Lorenzo calis the twelve oclock
Mass. Inside, on the altar to the right, there is a saint painted
blue and pink. From his left eye stream gray-winged insects
that fly in a straight line to the dome and Fa.ll, turned to dust, a
silent landslide of arm or touched by the suns hand. Whistles
blow in the towers of the factories. Decapitated pricks. A bird,
dressed in black, flies in circles and rests on the only living tree
on the plain. And then . . . There is no then. I move forward,
I pierce great rocks of years, great masses of compacted light, I
go down into galleries of mines of sand, I travel corridors that
cise on themselves like granite lips. And I return to the plain,
to the plain where it is always noon, where an identical sun
shines fixedly on an unmoving landscape. And the ringing of
the twelve bells never stops, or the buzzing of the flies, or the
explosion of this m inute that never passes, that only burns and
never passes.
[E.W.]

Capital
The screaming crest of dawn ames. First egg, first peck,
decapitation and delight! Feathers fly, wings spread, sailsswell,
16

and wing-oars dip in the sunrise. O h unreined light, rst light

rearing. Landslides of crystals burst from the m ountain,
tym panum -tam ping tim pani explode in my head.
Tastes nothing, scents nothing, the dawn, girl still nameless,
faceless still. Arrives, moves forward, pauses, heads for the
outskirts. Leaves a train of murmurs that open eyes. Becomes
lost in herself. The day with its hasty foot crushes a small star.
[E.W.]

Obsidian buttery
They killed my brothers, my children, my neles. O n the
banks of Lake Texcoco I began to weep. W hirlwinds of saltpeter rose from Pen hill, gently picked me up, and left me in
the courtyard of the Cathedral. I made myself so small and
gray that many mistook me for a pile of dust. Yes I, mother of
flint and star, I, bearer of the ray, am now but a blue feather
that a bird loses in the brambles. Once, I would dance, my
breasts high and turning, turning, turning until I became still,
and then I would sprout leaves, flowers, fruit. The eagle
throbbed in my belly. I was the m ountain that creates you as it
dreams, the house of fire, the prim ordial pot where man is
cooked and becomes man. In the night of the decapitated
words my sister and I, hand in hand, leapt and sang around the
I, the only standing tower in the razed alphabet. I still
remember my songs:
Light, headless light
Golden-throated light
Sings in the thicket green

They told us: the straight path never leads to winter. And
now my hands tremble, the words are caught in my throat.
Give me a chair and a little sun.
In other times, every hour was born from the vapor of my
breath, danced a while on the point of my dagger, and disap17

peared through the shining door of my hand mirror. I was the

tattooed noon and naked midnight, the little jade insect that
sings in the grass at dawn, and the clay nightingale that
summons the dead. I bathed in the suns waterfall, I bathed in
myself, soaked in my own splendor. I was the flint that rips the
storm clouds of night and opens the doors of the showers. I
planted gardens of fire, gardens of blood, in the Southern sky.
Its coral branches still graze the foreheads of lovers. There love
is the meeting of two meteors in the middle of space, and not
this obstinacy of rocks rubbing each other to ignite a sparking
kiss.
Each night is an eyelid the thorns never stop piercing. And
the day never ends, never stops counting itself, broken into
copper coins. I am tired of so many stone beads scattered in the
dust. I am tired of this unfinished solitaire. Lucky the mother
scorpion who devours her young. Lucky the spider. Lucky the
snake that sheds its skin. Lucky the water that drinks itself.
W hen will these images stop devouring me? W hen will I stop
falling in those empty eyes?
I am alone and fallen, grain of corn pulled from the ear of
time. Sow me among the battle dead. I will be born in the
captains eye. Rain down on me, give me sun. My body,
plowed by your body, will turn into a leld where one is sown
and a hundred reaped. W ait for me on the other side of the
year: you will meet me like a lightning flash stretched to the
edge of autumn. Touch my grass breasts. Kiss my belly, sacri
ficial stone. In my navel the whirlwind grows calm: I am the
fixed center that moves the dance. Burn, fall into me: I am the
pit of living lime that cures the bones oftheir aflictions. Die in
my lips. Rise from my eyes. Images gush from my body: drink
in these waters and remember what you forgot at birth. I am
the wound that does not heal, the small solar stone: ifyou strike
me, the world will go up in flames.
Take my necklace of tears. I wait for you on this side of time
where light has inaugurated ajoyous reign: the covenant of the
enemy twins, water, that escapes between our fingers, and ice,
petrified like a king in his pride. There you will open my body
to read the inscription of your fate.
[E.W.]
18

A poet
Music and bread, milk and wine, love and sleep: free. Great
mortal embrace of enemies that love each other: every wound
is a fountain. Friends sharpen their weapons well, ready for the
final dialogue to the end of time. The lovers cross the night
enlaced, conjunction of stars and bodies. M an is the food of
man. Knowledge is no diferent from dreaming, dreaming
from doing. Poetry has set fire to all poems. Words are finished,
images are finished. The distance between the ame and the
thing is abolished; to ame is to create, and to imagine, to be
born.
For now, grab your hoe, theorize, be punctual. Pay your price and
collectyour salary. Inyourfree time, graze untilyou burst: there are huge
meadows o f newspapers. Or, blow up every night at the caf table, your
tongue swollen with politics. Shut up or make noise: its all the same.
Somewhere they've already sentencedyou. There is no way out that does
not lead to dishonor or the gallows: your dreams are too clear, you need

a strong philosophy.

[E.W.]

Huastec lady
She walks by the riverbank, naked, healthy, newly bathed,
newly born from the night. O n her breast burn jewels wrenched
from summer. Covering her sex, the withered grass, the blue,
almost black grass that grows on the rim of the volcano. O n her
belly an eagle spreads its wings, two enemy flags entwine, and
water rests. She comes from afar, from the humid country. Few
have seen her. I will tell her secret: by day, she is a stone on the
side of the road; by night, a river that flows to the flank of man.
[E.W.]
19

Toward the poem

(STARTING -PO INTS)

Words, the profits of a quarter-hour wrenched from the charred tree o f

language, between the good mornings and the good nights, doors that
enter and exit and enter on a corridor that goes from noplace to nowhere.
We turn and turn in the animal belly, in the mineral belly, in the belly of
time. To fin d the way out: the poem.
Stubbornness o f that face where my gazes are broken. Armed mind,
unconquered before a countryside in ruins after the assault on the secret.
Volcanic melancholy.
The benevolent papier-mch pout o f the Chief the Leader, fetish o f the
century: the I, you, he, spinners o f spider webs, pronouns armed with
fingernails; faceless divinities, abstractions. He and we, We and He,
nobody and no one. God the Father avenges himself in all these idols.
The moment freezes, compact whiteness that blinds and does not answer
and dissolves, iceberg pushed by circular currents. It must return.
To rip off the masks of fantasy, to drive a spike into the sensitive center:
to provoke the eruption.
To cut the umbilical cord, kill the Mother: the crime that the modern
poet has committed for all, in the ame o f all. The young poet must
discover Wornan.
To speak for the sake o f speaking, to wrench sounds from the desperate,
to take dictation from the f ly s flight, to blacken. Time splits in two:
hour o f the somersault.
II

Words, phrases, syllables, stars that turn around a fixed center. Two
bodies, many beings that meet in a word. The paper is covered with

20

indehble letters that no one spoke, that no one dictated, that have fallen
there and ignite and burn and go out. This is how poetry exists, how love
exists. And if I dont exist, you do.
Everywhere solitary prisoners begin to create the words o f the new
dialogue.
The spring o f water. The mouthful o f health. A girl reclining on her
past. The wine, the fir, the guitar, the tablecloth. A red velvet wall in a
village square. The cheers, the shining cavalry entering the city, the
citizens in flight: hymns! Eruption o f the white, the green, the flaming.
Poetry: the easiest thing, that which writes itself
The poem creates a loving order. I foresee a sun-man and a moonwoman, he free o f his power, she o f her slavery, and implacable loves
streaking through black space. Everything mustyield to those incandescent
eagles.
Song dawns on the turrets o f your mind. Poetic justice burns fields o f
shame: there is no room for nostalgia, for the I, for proper nouns.
Every poem is fulfilled at the poets expense.
Future noon, huge tree o f invisible leaves. In the plazas, men and women
sing the solar song, fountain o f transparencies. The yellow surf covers
me: nothing mine will speak through my mouth.
When History sleeps, it speaks in dreams: on the forehead o f the sleeping
people, the poem is a constellation ofblood. When History wakes, image
becomes act, the poem happens: poetry moves into action.
Deserve your dream.

[E.W.]

21

Hymn among the ruins

I1There foam s the Sicilian sea

.. .

Gngora

Self crowned the day displays its plumage.

A shout tall and yellow,
im partial and beneficent,
a hot geyser into the middle sky!
Appearances are beautiful in this their m omentary truth.
The sea mounts the coast,
clings between the rocks, a dazzling spider;
the livid wound on the m ountain glistens;
a handful of goats becomes a flock of stones;
the sun lays its gold egg upon the sea.
All is god.
A broken statue,
columns gnawed by the light,
ruins alive in a world of death in life!
Night falls on Teotihuacn.
On top of the pyramid the boys are smoking marijuana,
harsh guitars sound.
What weed, what living waters w ill give life to us,
where shall we unearth the word,
the relations that govern hymn and speech,
the dance, the city and the measuring scales?
The song of Mxico explodes in a curse,
a colored star that is extinguished,
a stone that blocks our doors o f contact.
Earth tastes o f rotten earth.

Eyes see, hands touch.

Here a few things sufTice:
prickly pear, coral and thorny planet,
the hooded figs,
grapes that taste of the resurrection,
clams, stubborn maidenheads,
salt, cheese, wine, the suns bread.
22

An island girl looks on me from the height of her duskiness,

a slim cathedral clothed in light.
A tower of salt, against the green pines of the shore,
the white sails of the boats arise.
Light builds temples on the sea.
New York, London, Moscow.
Shadow covers the plain with its phantom ivy,
with its swaying and feverish vegetation,
its mousy fur, its rats swarm.
Now and then an anemic sun shivers.
Propping himself on mounts that yesterday were cities,
Polyphemus yawns.
Below, among the pits, a herd of men dragging along.
(.Domestic bipeds, their flesh
despite recent religious prohibitions
is much-loved by the wealthy classes.
Until lately people considered them unclean animals.)

To see, to touch each days lovely forms.

The light throbs, all darties and wings.
The wine-stain on the tablecloth smells of blood.
As the coral thrusts branches into the water
I stretch my senses to this living hour:
the moment fulfills itself in a yellow harmony.
Midday, ear of wheat heavy with minutes,
eternitys brimming cup.
M y thoughts are split, meander, grow entangled,
start again,
and finally lose headway, endless rivers,
delta o f blood beneath an unwinking sun.
And must everything end in this spatter of stagnant water?

Day, round day,

shining orange with four-and-twenty bars,
all one single yellow sweetness!
M ind embodies in forms,
the two hostile become one,
the conscience-mirror liquifies,
23

once more a fountain of legends:

man, tree of images,
words which are flowers become fruits which are deeds.
jXaples, 1948

[W .C.W .]

Is there no way out?

Dozing I hear an incessant
river running between dimly discerned, looming
forms, drowsy and frowning.
It is the black and white cataract, the voices,
the laughter, the groans, of a confused
world hurling itself from a height.
And my thoughts that gallop and gallop and get
no further also fall and rise, and turn
back and plunge into the stagnant waters of
language.
A second ago it would have been easy to grasp a
word and repeat it once and then again,
any one of those phrases one utters alone in a
room without mirrors
to prove to oneself that its not certain,
that we are still alive after all,
but now with weightless hands night is lulling the
furious tide, and one by one images recede,
one by one words cover their faces.
The time is past already for hoping for tim es
arrival, the time of yesterday, today and tomorrow,
yesterday is today, tomorrow is today, today all
is today, suddenly it carne forth from itself
and is watching me,
it doesnt come from the past, it is not going
anywhere, today is here, it is not death
no one dies of death, everyone dies of life it
24

is not lifeinstantaneous fruit, vertiginous

and lucid rapture, the empty taste of death
gives more life to life
today is not death or life,
has no body, or ame, or face, today is here,
east at my feet, looking at me.
I am standing, quiet at the center of the circle
I made in falling away from my thoughts,
I am standing and I have nowhere to turn my eyes
to, not one splintered fragment of the past
is left,
all childhood has brought itself to this instant
and the whole future is these pieces of
furniture nailed to their places,
the wardrobe with its wooden face, the chairs
lined up waiting for nobody,
the chubby arm chair with its arms spread, obscene
as if dead in its bed,
the electric fanconceited insectthe lying
window, the actual without chinks or cracks,
all has shut itself up in itself, I have come back
to where I began, everything is today and
forever.
Way of there, on the other side, shores extend,
immense as a look of love,
there the night clothed in water displays its
hieroglyphs within hands reach,
the river enters singing along the sleeping plain
and moistens the roots of the word freedom,
there enlaced bodies lose themselves in a forest
of transparent trees,
under the leaves of the sun we walk, we
are two reflections that cross swords with
each other,
silver stretches bridges for us to cross the night,
stones make way for us,
there you are the tattooing on the jade breast fallen
from the moon, there the insomniac diamond
yields
25

and in its empty center we are the eye that never

blinks and the transfixin of the instant
held within itself in its splendor.
All is far ofT, there is no way back, the dead
are not dead, the living are not alive,
there is a wall, an eye that is a well, all that is
puls downwards, the body is heavy,
thoughts are heavy, all the years are this m inute
that is dropping interm inably down,
from that hotel room in San Francisco I stepped
right into Bangkok, today is yesterday,
tomorrow is yesterday,
reality is a staircase going neither up or down,
we dont move, today is today, always is today,
always the sound of trains that depart each night
towards night,
the resort to toothless words,
the boring through of the wall, the comings and
goings, reality shutting doors,
putting in commas, the punctuation of time, all
is far o, the walls are enormous,
the glass of w ater is thousands of miles away, it
will take me a thousand years to cross my
room again,
what a remte sound the word life has, I am not
here, there is no here, this room is somewhere else, here is nowhere, little by little
I have been shutting myself and I find no
exit that doesnt give onto this instant,
this instant is I, I went out of myself all at
once, I have no ame and no face,
I am here, cast at my feet, looking at myself
looking to see myself seen.
Outside, in the gardens that summer has ravaged
a cicada rages against the night.
Am I or was I here?
Tokyo, 1952

26

[D.L.]

The river
The restless city circles in my blood like a bee.
And the plae that traces a querulous moan in a long S, the
trams that break down on remte corners,
that tree weighted with aronts that someone shakes at midnight
in the plaza,
the noises that rise and shatter and those that fade away and
whisper a secret that wriggles in the ear,
they open the darkness, precipices of as and os, tunnels of
taciturn vowels,
galleries I run down blindfolded, the drowsy alphabet falls in the
pit like a river of ink,
and the city goes and comes and its stone body shatters as it
arrives at my temple,
all night, one by one, statue by statue, fountain by fountain,
stone by stone, the whole night long
its shards seek one another in my forehead, all night long the
city talks in its sleep through my mouth,
a gasping discourse, a stammering of waters and arguing stone,
its story.
To stop still an instant, to still my blood which goes and comes,
goes and comes and says nothing,
seated on top of me like a yogi in the shadow of a fig tree, like
Buddha on the rivers edge, to stop the instant,
a single instant, seated on the edge of time, to strike out my
image of the river that talks in its sleep and says nothing and
carries me with it,
seated on the bank to stop the river, to unlock the instant, to
penetrate its astonished rooms reaching the center of water,
to drink at the inexhaustible fountain, to be the cascade of blue
syllables falling from stone lips,
seated on the edge of night like Buddha on his self s edge, to be
the flicker of the lidded instant,
the conflagration and the destruction and the birth of the instant,
the breathing of night rushing enormous at the edge of time,
to say what the river says, a long word resembling lips, a long
word that never ends,
27

to say vvhat time says in hard sentences of stone, in vast gestures

of sea covering worlds.
In mid-poem a great helplessness overtakes me, everything
abandons me,
there is no one beside me, not even those eyes that gaze from
behind me at what I write,
no one behind or in front of me, the pen mutinies, there is
neither beginning or end or even a wall to leap,
the poem is a deserted esplanade, w hats said is not said, the
unsaid is unsayable,
towers, devastated terraces, Babylons, a sea ofblacksalt, a blind
kingdom,
No,
to stop myself, to keep quiet, to cise my eyes until a green spike
sprouts from my eyelids, a spurt of suns,
and the alphabet wavers long under the wind of the visin and
the tide rolls into one wave and the wave breaks the dike,
to wait until the paper is covered with stars and the poem a
forest of tangled words,
No,
I have nothing to say, no one has anything to say, nothing and
nobody except the blood,
nothing except this coming and going of the blood, this writing
over the written, the repetition of the same word in mid-poem,
syllables of time, broken letters, splotches of ink, blood that goes
and comes and says nothing and carries me with it.
And I speak, my beak bent over the paper and someone beside
me writes while the blood goes and comes,
and the city goes and comes through his blood, wants to say
something, time wants to say something, the night wants to
speak,
all night long the man wants to say one single word, to speak his
discourse at last, made up of moldered stones,
and I whet my hearing, I want to hear what the man says, to
repeat what the drifting city says,
all night the broken stones seek one another, groping in my
forehead, all night the water fights the stone,
the words against the night, the night against the night, nothing
lights up the opaque combat,
28

the shock of arms does not wrench away a single gleam to the
stone, one spark to the night, no one grants a respite,
it is a fight to the death between immortals,
No,
to oer retreat, to stop the river of blood, the river of ink,
to go back upstream, and that the night turn upon itself
display its bowels,
and that the water show its heart, a cluster of drowned mirrors,
may time thicken and its wound be an invisible scar, scarcely
a delicate line upon the skin of the world,
let the words lay down their arms and the poem be one single
interwoven word,
and may the soul be the blackened grass after fire, the lunar
breast of a sea thats turned to stone and reflects nothing
except splayed dimensin, expansin, space lying down upon
itself, spread wings immense,
and may everything be like ame that cuts itself into and freezes
into the rock of diaphanous bowels,
hard blazing resolved now in crystal, peaceable clarity.
And the river goes back upstream, strikes its sails, picks up its
images and coils within itself.
Geneva, 1953

[P.B.]

Sun stone
La treizieme revient . . . cest encor la premiere;
et cest toujours la seule ou cest le seul moment;
car es-tu reine, toi, la premiere ou derniere?
es-tu roi, toi le seul ou le dernier amant?

Grard de Nerval, Arthmis,,

willow of crystal, a poplar of water,

a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
29

advances and retreats, goes roundabout,

arriving forever:
the calm course of a star
or the spring, appearing without urgency,
water behind a stillness of closed eyelids
flowing all night and pouring out prophecies,
a single presence in the procession of waves,
wave over wave until all is overlapped,
in a green sovereignty without decline
a bright hallucination of many wings
when they all open at the height of the sky,
course of a journey among the densities
of the days of the future and the fateful
brilliance of misery shining like a bird
that petrifies the forest with its singing
and the annunciations of happiness
among the branches which go disappearing,
hours of light even now pecked away by the birds,
omens which even now fly out of my hand,
an actual presence like a burst of singing,
like the song of the wind in a burning building,
a long look holding the whole world suspended,
the world with all its seas and all its mountains,
body of light as it is filtered through agate,
the thighs of light, the belly of light, the bays,
the solar rock and the cloud-colored body,
color of day that goes racing and leaping,
the hour glitters and assumes its body,
now the world stands, visible through your body,
and is transparent through your transparency,
I go a journey in galleries of sound,
I flow among the resonant presences
going, a blind man passing transparencies,
one m irror cancels me, I rise from another,
forest whose trees are the pillars of magic,
under the arches of light I go among
the corridors of a dissolving autum n,
30

I go among your body as among the world,

your belly the sunlit center of the city,
your breasts two churches where are celebrated
the great parallel mysteries of the blood,
the looks of my eyes cover you like ivy,
you are a city by the sea assaulted,
you are a ram part by the light divided
into two halves, distinct, color of peaches,
and you are saltiness, you are rocks and birds
beneath the edict of concentrated noon,
and dressed in the coloring of my desires
you go as naked as my thoughts go naked,
I go among your eyes as I swim water,
the tigers come to these eyes to drink their dreams,
the hummingbird is burning among these flames,
I go upon your forehead as on the moon,
like cloud I go among your imagining
journey your belly as I journey your dream,
your loins are harvest, a field of waves and singing,
your loins are crystal and your loins are water,
your lips, your hair, the looks you give me, they
all night shower down like rain, and all day long
you open up my breast with your fingers of water,
you cise my eyelids with your mouth of water,
raining upon my bones, and in my breast
the roots of water drive deep a liquid tree,
I travel through your waist as through a river,
I voyage your body as through a grove going,
as by a footpath going up a mountain
and suddenly coming upon a steep ravine
I go the straitened way of your keen thoughts
break through to daylight upon your white forehead
and there my spirit lings itself down, is shattered
now I collect my fragments one by one
and go on, bodiless, searching, in the dark.
31

the limitless corridors of memory

the doors that open on empty living-rooms
where every springtime withers and rots away
the jewels of thirst are burning at the base,
the face obliterated at memory,
the hand which will dissolve if I even touch it,
threads of those spider-webs in chaos over
the smiling of a past that falls away,
I search where I come face to face with daylight,
search without finding, I search for a moment,
for a face of lightning-flash and thunderstorm
running among the enormous trees of night,
face of all rain in a garden of shadows,
insistent water that flows along my side,
I search without finding, and I write alone,
no one is here, and the day ends, the year ends,
I have gone down with the moment, all the way down,
the road is invisible over all these mirrors,
they repeat and refiect forever my broken image,
I pace the days, the moments pave this roadway,
I step upon the thinking of my shadow,
I pace my shadow in search of my one moment,
I seek the day live as a live bird,
I seek the five oclock sun of afternoon
tempered red by the red walls of tezontle:
an afternoon hour, ripening its clusters,
and as it bursts the girls emerge in light
from that rose-colored center and they scatter
out from the terrace of the college building,
tall as the autum n one girl walking onward
involved in light among the far arcades
and space girdles her round in a bright garment
of a new body more golden and transparent,
a tiger the color of light, a dark-brown deer
loping along the outskirts of the night,
a girl glimpsed once as she that once reclined
32

along the greenest balconies of the rain,

the endless unnum bered adolescent face,
I have forgotten your ame, was it Melusine,
Laura, Isabel, M ary, Persephone,
your face is all their faces and none of them,
you are all the times and never any of them,
you take on the likeness of a tree, a cloud,
you are all birds and now you are a star,
now you resemble the sharp edge of a sword
and now the executioners bowl of blood,
the encroaching ivy that overgrows and then
roots out the soul and divides it from itself,
writing of fire on the slab of jade,
the cleft in the rock, serpent-goddess and queen,
pillar of cloud, and fountain struck from the stone,
the nest of eagles, the circle of the moon,
the seed of anise, mortal and smallest thorn
that has the power to give immortal pain,
shepherd of valleys underneath the sea
and guardian of the valley of the dead,
liana that hangs at the pitch of vrtigo,
climber and bindweed and the venomous plant,
flower of resurrection and grape of life,
lady of the flute and of the lightning-flash,
terrace of jasmine, and salt rubbed in the wound,
a branch of roses for the man shot down,
snowstorm in August, moon of the harrowing,
the writing of the sea cut in basalt,
the writing of the wind upon the desert,
testament of the sun, pomegranate, wheat-ear,
a face of flames, face that is eaten away,
the adolescent and persecuted face
the years of fantasy and circular days
th a t open upon th e s a m e S treet, th e s a m e wall,
the moment fiares up and they are all one face,
the procession of faces of this calling,
all of these ames are unified in one ame,
all of these faces are now a single face,
33

all centuries are now a single instant

and throughout the centuries of centuries
the path to the future shut by these two eyes,
there is nothing before me, but a moment
recovered tonight, standing against a dream
that is dreamed of images all intertwined,
sculptured in permanence against the dream:
a moment torn from the zero of this night,
lifted up forcibly, feature by feature,
meanwhile, beyond it, time, spilling its guts,
and hammering, banging on the door of my soul,
the world, with its blood-spattered calendar,
only a moment while the capitals,
the ames, strong flavors, the brightness of all things
crumble away within my sightless forehead,
while the mute heavy grieving of the night
beats down my thinking and my skeleton
and my blood courses more deliberately
and now my teeth begin to relent, my eyes
begin to cloud over; and the days and years
go heaping up their high and empty horrors,
time in an ancient gesture folds its fan
and there is nothing behind its images
the moment plunges into itself and floats
encircled by death among the threatenings
of the enormous mournful yawn of midnight,
and wholly threatened by the hullabaloo
of death enlivened by energy and masked,
the moment plunges and it pierces itself,
closes as a fist closes, like a perfect
fruit that ripens inwards in its own good time
spontaneously, drinks itself, and scatters,
the numinous moment shines, pierces itself,
and ripens inward, ripens and puts forth roots,
it grows within me, it completely filis me,
lavishes out on me delirious branches,
the thoughts flying within me are its birds,
34

and in my veins its mercury circulates,

the tree of the mind, its fruit tasting of time,
and life! to be lived, vivid nevertheless,
time that turns into a great surf approaching,
withdrawing without ever turning back,
the past is not the past, but it is here, now,
and in the silence of the present, it filis
into another moment which vanishes:
facing an afternoon, stone and saltpeter,
an enormous fleet of invisible razors,
you write a red and indecipherable
writing upon my skin and these open wounds
cover my body, a burning suit of fame,
I burn and am not consumed, I long for water,
and in your eyes there is no water, but stone,
your breasts are stone, your belly is stone, your loins
are made of stone, your mouth has the taste of dust,
your mouth tastes to me of an envenomed time,
your body has the taste of a pit without
any exit, a hall of mirrors reflecting
the eyes of one thirsty man, a corridor
returning forever to its starting point,
and I in blindness, you take me by the hand
along these endless obstnate galleries
into the center of this circle; erect,
you stand like lightning frozen into an axe,
the flaying light drawing and fascinating
as the built scaTold of death to the condemned,
flexible as a braided whip and slender
a twin weapon, a weapon like the moon,
and keenness of your speaking penetrates
my breast, leaving me empty and desoate,
you rip up all my memories by the roots,
I have forgotten my ame, and now my friends
go grunting among the hogs, or lie and rot
eaten by the sun, beneath the precipice,
35

now there is nothing in me but one vast wound,

a gap with no possible way of healing,
a now without windows, a turn of intellect
moving on itself, repeating and reflecting,
it loses itself in its own transparency,
self-knowledge that is shot through by the eye
that watches itself watching, drowning itself
in clarity:
I saw your frightful armor,
Melusine, at dawn, in your green scales burning,
you slept, in coils and entangled with the sheets,
and like a bird you shrieked on awakening
whitened and dwindled away, endlessly, broken,
nothing remained of you except that shrieking,
and at the end of the years, I find myself
with a cough and poor eyesight, turning over
od photographs:
nobody, you were no one,
nobody, a heap of ashes and a broom,
a knife with a notched edge, a feather duster,
a few feet of skin suspended on some bones,
a dried-out bunch of something, a black hole
and there at the bottom of the hole two eyes
eyes of a girl drowned a thousand years ago,
those looks buried at the bottom of the pit,
looking at us from the beginning of time,
the young girl in her seeing an od mother
who sees within her grown son a young father,
the m others seeing of a lonely daughter
who sees in the kingly father a young son,
looks that look into us to the furthest depth
of life, that are the traps and snares of death
is it the opposite? is falling in those eyes
the way back to the true and central life?
to fa.ll, to return, to dream, and let me be
the dream of the eyes of the future, another life,
other clouds, and die at last another death!
tonight is my life, and this single moment
36

which never stops opening, never stops revealing

where my life lay, who I was, what your ame is
and what my own ame is:
was it I planning
for summer comingand all coming summers
in Christopher Streetthis was ten years ago
with Phyllis in the bright hollows of whose throat
the sparrows could come to drink, drinking the light?
on the Reforma did Carmen say to me
"this air is dry, its always October here,
or did the other one say that, the one I lost,
or did I invent it, did nobody say it to me?
Was it I riding through a Oaxaca night
that was black-green and enormous, like a tree,
soliloquizing like the fantastic wind;
coming back to my roomalways a room somewhere
could the mirrors really not recognize me?
at the Hotel Vernet did we see dawn
dance with the chestnut treesits late already
and did you do your hair and did I watch
the stains on the wall without saying a word?
did we go up the tower together, and see
the day descending on the outer reef?
did we eat grapes at Bidart? was it we
buying gardenias at Perote?
ames, places,
streets and streets, faces, streets, circles,
railway stations, a park, the single rooms,
stains on the wall, somebody combing her hair,
somebody singing beside me, somebody dressing,
rooms, places, streets, ames, rooms,
M adrid, nineteen hundred and thirty-seven,
on the Plaza del Angel seeing the women
doing their sewing and singing with their sons,
and then the shriek of the siren and their shriek,
houses brought down and crawling in the dust,
the towers cloven, the faces running spittle
and the hurricane of engines, I hold static:
two naked people loving one another

for the sake of defending our eternal portion,

our rationing of time and of paradise,
to touch our root, to reach ourselves in touching,
to recover our inheritance pirated
by robbers of life in a thousand centuries,
these two took their clothes off and they kissed
because these nakednesses, woven together,
can overleap time and are invulnerable,
nothing can touch them, they go to the origins,
there is no You or I, tomorrow, yesterday, ames,
there truly two become only one body and soul,
O total being . . .
there are rooms that are adrift
among the great cities that go foundering,
furnished rooms, city streets, ames striking like wounds,
the room whose windows look out on other rooms
all papered in the same discoloured paper
where a man in shirt-sleeves reads his newspaper
or a woman irons; the room lit bright in spring
and, entering, the branches of the peach tree;
the other room: outside it is always raining,
there is a courtyard with three rusted children,
rooms that are ships, and that are rocking and singing
in a gulf of brilliance; or the submarines:
silence dispersed upon the greenness of waves
and everything that we touch phosphoresces;
memorials to a luxury whose pictures
are eaten away over the threadbare carpets;
trap-doors, cells, oubliettes, enchanted caverns,
cages of birds, and rooms with numbers on them,
everything is transfigured, everything is in light,
all these moldings are clouds, and every door
opens on the sea, the eld, the air; each meal
is now a celebration; sealed tight as shells,
time cannot hope, besieging them, to conquer,
there is no time here, no wall: space, space is here,
open your hand and gather these riches in,
cut all the fruits, this life is here to eat,
lie at the foot of this tree, and drink the water!
38

everything is transfigured and is sacred,

and each room is now the center of the world,
tonight is the first night, today the rst day,
whenever two people kiss the world is born,
a drop of light with guts of transparency
the room like a fruit splits and begins to open
or burst like a star among the silences
and all laws now rat-gnawed and eaten away,
barred windows of banks and penitentiaries,
the bars of paper, and the barbed-wire fences,
the stamps and the seis, the sharp prongs and the spurs
the one-note sermn of the bombs and wars,
the gentle scorpion in his cap and gown,
the tiger who is the president of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty and the Red Cross,
the pedagogical ass, and the crocodile
set up as savior, father of his country,
the founder, the leader, the shark, the architect
of the future of us all, the hog in uniform,
and then that one, the favorite son of the Church
who can be seen brushing his black teeth
in holy water and taking evening courses
in English and democracy, the invisible
barriers, the mad and decaying masks
that are used to separate us, man from man,
and man from his own self
they are thrown down
for an enormous instant and we see darkly
our own lost unity, how vulnerable it is
to be women and men, the glory it is to be man
and share our bread and share our sun and our death,
the dark forgotten marvel of being alive;
to love is to struggle, and if two people kiss
the world is transformed, and all desires made flesh
and intellect is made flesh; great wings put forth
their shoots from the shoulders of the slave, the world
is real and to be touched and the wine is wine,
the bread can taste again, the water is water,
to love is to struggle, is to open the doors,

to stop being a fantasy with a num ber

condcmned to the sentence of the endless chain
by a faceless master;
and the world is changed
when two people look at each other, recognizing
to love is to take ofT our clothes and our ames:
Allow me to be your whore, these are the words
of Heloise, but he gave in to the law,
he took her to be his wife, and as reward,
later, they castrated him;
better to have the crime,
the suicidal lovers, or the incest
between two brothers, as between two mirrors
falling in love and loving their reflections,
better to venture and eat the poisoned bread,
better adultery on beds of ashes,
the ferocious passions, and delirium,
its venomous ivy, and the sodomite
who carries for his buttonhole carnation
a gobbet of spit, better be killed by stoning
in the public square than tread the mili that grinds
out into nothing the substance of our life,
changes eternity into hollow hours,
minutes into penitentiaries, and time
into some copper pennies and abstract shit;
better take chastity, the invisible flower
swaying among the evening stalks of silence,
the difficult diam ond of the saints of heaven
which filters out the desires and satiates time,
makes marriages of quietude and movement,
sings the song of solitude, her corolla,
a petal of crystal is, she sings, each hour,
the world is stripping itself of all its masks
and at its center, vibrating, transparent,
that being we cali God, the nameless being,
contemplative of itself in nothingness,
the faceless being emerging from its self,
sun of suns, fullness of presences and ames;
I follow my delirium, rooms, rooms, streets,
40

walk groping and groping down the corridors

of time and over and under its staircases
I feel along its walls and, not advancing,
I turn to where I began, I seek your face,
walk doubtfully these dim streets of my own self
under a timeless sun and you beside me
walk with me like a tree, a river going
walk with me speaking to me like a river,
grow like a stalk of wheat among my fingers,
throb like a squirrel warm among my fingers,
flying become a thousand birds, your smiling
has covered my body with sea-foam, your head
is a nbula in small between my hands,
the world grows fresh and green while you are smiling
and eating an orange
and the world is changed
if two people shaken by dizziness and enlaced
are fallen among the grass: the sky descending,
the trees pointing and climbing upward, and space
alone among all things is light and silence,
and pur space opens to the eagle of the eye,
and it sees pass the white tribe of the clouds,
the bodys cables snap, the soul sails out,
now is the moment we lose our ames, and float
along the border-line between blue and green,
the integrated time when nothing happens
but the event, belonging, communicating,
nothing happens, nothing, you become calm, blinking
(silence: an ngel crosses over in this moment
enormous as the life of a hundred suns),
has nothing happened but the flickering eyelid?
and the banquet, the exile, the first murder,
the jawbone of an ass, the city-battering sound
and the unbelieving gaze of the dead man
falling on the embers of the burning field,
and Agamemnons lowing, immense howl,
the repetitious crying of Cassandra
a louder sound than the sound of waves crying,
and Scrates in chains (the sun is rising,
41

to die is to awake: Crito, I owe a

cock to Aesculapius, for being cured of life),
the jackal who gives tongue among the ruins
of Nineveh, the shadow Brutus beheld
the night before the battle, M octezuma
lying on his bed of thorns, insomnia,
the journey in the tumbril, the way to death
the interm inable journey made still longer
for Robespierre progressing inch by inch
holding his shattered jawbone in his hands
C hurruca acting as if his vat were a throne
of scarlet, and the measured steps of Lincoln
getting ready, that night, to go to theater,
the rattle in Trotskys throat and then his moan
as of a wild boar, M adero and his gaze
answered by nobody: why are they killing me?
the balls, the guts, the alases, silences
of the saint, the criminal, and the poor devil,
graveyards of phrases and of those anecdotes
that the od dogs of rhetoric scratch over,
delirium, whinnying, the obscure noises
which have to do with death, this panting frenzy
of life getting itself born, the scraping sounds
of bones m acerated in ferocity
and the m outh of foam that is the prophets mouth
and his cry and the cry of the torturer
and the cry of the victim . . .
they are flames
the eyes are flames and those who gaze are flaming
the ear is fire and the ery music,
live coal the lips and the tongue firebrand,
the one w'ho touches and the one who is touching,
thinking and thought, and the thinker is a fire
and all things burn and the universe is fame,
and nothing burns like the rest, nothing which is
nothing except a thought in flames, ultm ate smoke:
there is no victim and no torturer . . .
and the cry
that Friday afternoon? and then the silence
covering all the air with symbols, silence
42

which speaks without speaking, does it say nothing?

are they nothing at all, the cries of men?
does nothing happen in time but time passing?
nothing happens, only the fiickering eyelid
of the great sun, hardly a movement, nothing,
the unredeemable boundaries of time,
the dead are all pinned down by their own dying,
they cannot die again of another death,
they are untouchable, locked in their gestures,
and since their solitude and since their dying
this only can they do: stare sightless at us,
their death is simply the statue of their life,
perpetual being and nothingness without end,
for every moment is nothing without end,
a king of fantasy regulates your pulse
and your last gesture carves an impassive mask
and lays that sculpture over your mobile face:
we are the monument raised to an alien
life, a life unlived, not lively, hardly ours.
and this our life, when was it truly ours?
and when are we truly whatever we are?
for surely we are not, we never are
anything alone but spinning and emptiness,
crazy faces made in the mirror, horror,
vomit; life is not ours, it is the others,
it is not anybodys, all of us are
lifethe bread of the sun for all the others,
all of those others who are us, we ourselves
I am the other when I am myself, my acts
are more my own when they are everybodys,
because to be myself I must be other,
go out of myself, seek my self among others,
those others who are not if I do not exist,
others give me the fullness of my existence,
I am not, there is no I, We are forever,
and life is otherwise, always there, farther,
beyond thee, beyond me, eternal horizon,
life that is dying for us, life that is made for
43

and invents us, our faces, eats them away,

the thirst for existence, death, bread of us all.
Heloise, Persephone, and M ary, thou,
turn to me then at last that you may see
my turn and central face, that of the other,
my face of us all, that is always all of us,
face of the living tree and the breadm an,
the driver and the thunderhead, the sailor,
the suns face, the arroyos, faces of Peter and Paul,
face of the individual collective,
awaken me, now I am born:
life and death
are reconciled in thee, lady of midnight,
tower of clarity, empress of daybreak,
moon virgin, m other of all m other liquids,
body and flesh of the world, the house of death,
I have been endlessly falling since my birth,
I fall in my own self, never touch my depth,
gather me in your eyes, at last bring together
my scattered dust, make peace among my ashes,
bind the dismemberment of my bones, and breathe
upon my being, bring me to earth in your earth,
your silence of peace to the intellectual act
against itself aroused;
open now your hand
lady of the seeds of life, seeds that are days,
day is an immortality, it rises, it grows,
is done with being born and never is done,
every day is a birth, and every daybreak
another birthplace and I am the break of day,
we all dawn on the day, the sun dawns
and daybreak is the face of the sun, John
is the break of day with Jo h n s face, face of all,
gate of our being, awaken me, bring dawn,
grant that I see the face of the living day,
grant that I see the face of this live night,
everything speaks now, everything is transformed,
O arch of blood, bridge of our pulse beating,
44

carry me through to the far side of this night,

the place where I am You, equals Ourselves,
kingdom of persons and pronouns intertwined,
gateway of being: open your being, awaken,
learn then to be, begin to carve your face,
develop your elements, and keep your visin
keen to look at my face, as I at yours,
keen to look full at life right through to death,
faces of sea, of bread, of rock, of fountain,
the spring of origin which will dissolve our faces
in the nameless face, existence without face
the inexpressible presence of presences . . .
I want to go on, to go beyond; I cannot;
the moment scatters itself in many things,
I have slept the dreams of the stone that never dreams
and deep among the dreams of years like stones
have heard the singing of my imprisoned blood,
with a premonition of light the sea sang,
and one by one the barriers give way,
all of the gates have fallen to decay,
the sun has forced an entrance through my forehead,
has opened my eyelids at last that were kept closed,
unfastened my being of its swaddling clothes,
has rooted me out of my self, and separated
me from my animal sleep centuries of stone
and the magic of reflections resurrects
willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever:
Mxico City, 1957

[M .R.]

45

Dawn
Coid rapid hands
draw back one by one
the bandages of dark
I open my eyes
still
I am living
at the center
of a wound still fresh

[C.T.]

Here
My

s te p s along th is S tr ee t
resou n d
in a n o t h e r S tr ee t
in w h ic h
I h e a r my s te p s
p a s s in g a l o n g th is S tr ee t
in w h ic h

Only the mist is real

Landscape
Rock and precipice,
more time than stone, this
timeless matter.
46

[C.T.]

Through its cicatrices

falls without moving
perpetual virgin water.
Immensity reposes here
rock on rock,
rocks over air.
The worlds manifest
as it is: a sun
immobile, in the abyss.
Scale of vrtigo:
the crags weigh
no more than our shadows.

[C.T.]

Certainty
If it is real the white
light from this lamp, real
the writing hand, are they
real, the eyes looking at what I write?
From one word to the other
what I say vanishes.
I know that I am alive
between two parentheses.

[C.T.]

47

Touch
My hands
open the curtains of your being
clothe you in a further nudity
uncover the bodies of your body
My hands
invent another body for your body

[C.T.]

Duration
Thunder and wind: duration

I Ching

Sky black

Yellow earth
The rooster tears the night apart
The water wakes and asks what time it is
The wind wakes and asks for you
A white horse goes by
II

As the forest in its bed of leaves

you sleep in your bed of rain
you sing in your bed of wind
you kiss in your bed of sparks
III

M ltiple vehement odor

many-handed body
48

On an invisible stem a single

whiteness
IV

Speak listen answer me

what the thunder-clap
says, the woods
understand
V

I enter by your eyes

you come forth by my mouth
You sleep in my blood
I waken in your head
VI

I will speak to you in stone-language

(answer with a green syllable)
I will speak to you in snow-language
(answer with a fan of bees)
I will speak to you in water-language
(answer with a canoe of lightning)
I will speak to you in blood-language
(answer with a tower of birds)

[D.L.]

Last dawn
Your hair lost in the forest,
your feet touching mine.
Asleep you are bigger than the night,
but your dream fits within this room.
49

How much we are who are so little!

Outside a taxi passes
with its load of ghosts.
The river that runs by
is always
running back.
Will tomorrow be another day?

Salamander
Salam ander

(the fire wears

black armor)
a slow-burning stove
between the jaws
marble or brick
of the chimney it is
an ecstatic tortoise, a crouched
Japanese warrior:
whatever it is, m artyrdom
is repose
impassive under torture
Salam ander
ancient ame of fire

and ancient
antidote to fire
flayed sol of the foot
on hot coals
am ianthus amante am ianthus

Salam ander
in the abstract city between
dizzy geometries
50

[E.W.]

glass cement stone iron

formidable chimeras appear
raised up by calculus
multiplied by profit
by the side of the anonymous wall
sudden poppy
Salamander
Yellow claw a scrawl
of red letters on a
wall ofsalt
Claw of sunlight
on a heap of bones
Salamander
fallen star
in the endlessness of bloodstained opal
ensepulchred
beneath eyelids of quartz
lost girl
in tunnels of onyx
in the circles of basalt
buried seed
grain of energy
in the marrow of granite
Salamander, you who lay dynamite in irons
black and blue breast
you explode like a sun
you open yourself like a wound
you speak
as a fountain speaks
Salamander

blade of wheat
daughter of fire
spirit of fire
condensation of blood
sublimation of blood
evaporation of blood
51

Salam ander of air

the rock is fame
the fame is smoke
red vapor
straight-rising prayer
lofty word of praise
exclamation
crown
of fire on the head of the psalm
scarlet queen
(and girl with purple stockings
running disheveled through the woods)
Salamander, you are
silent, the
black consoler of sulfur tears

Caucasian salam ander

(One wet summer I heard

the vibration of your
cylindrical tail
between loose tiles of a
dead-calm moonlit patio)

in the rocks
cindery shoulder appears
and disappears
a brief black tongue
fiecked with safron

Black and brilliant creature

the moss
quivers
you devour
insects
diminutive herald of the rain-shower
familiar spirit of the lightning
(Internal fecundation
oviparious reproduction
the young live in the water
once adult they swim sluggishly)
52

Salamander
Hanging bridge between eras
bridge of coid blood
axis of movement
(The changes in the alpine species
the most slender of all
take place in the m other s womb
O f all the tiny eggs no more than two m ature
and until they hatch
the embryos are nourished on a broth
composed of the doughy mass of their aborted brother-eggs)
The Spanish Salamander
black and red mountaineer
The sun nailed to the skys center does not throb
does not breathe
life does not commence without blood
without the embers of sacrifice
the wheel of days does not revolve
Xlotl refuses to consume himself
he hid himself in the corn but they found him
he hid himself in the maguey but they found him
he fell into the water and became the fish axlotl
the Double-Being
and then they killed him
Movement began, the world was set in motion
the procession of dates and ames
Xlotl the dog, guide to Hell
he who dug up the bones of the fathers
he who cooked the bones in a pot
he who lit the fire of the years
the maker of men
Xlotl the penitent
the burst eye that weeps for us
Xlotl
larva of the butterfly
double of the Star
sea-shell
other face of the Lord of Dawn
Xlotl the axlotl
53

Salam ander
solar arrow
lamp of the moon
column of noonday
ame of woman
scales of night
(The infinite weight of light
a half-drachm on your eyelashes)
Salam ander
back ame
sunflower
you yourself the sun
the moon
turning for ever around you
pom egranate that bursts itself open each night
fixed star on the brow of the sky
and beat of the sea and the stilled light
open mind above the
to-and-fro of the sea
The star-lizard, salamandria
saurian scarcely eight centimeters long
lives in crevices and is the color of dust
Salam ander of earth and water
green stone in the m outh of the dead
stone of incarnation
stone of fire
sweat of the earth
salt flaming and scorching
salt of destruction and
mask of lime that consumes the face
Salam ander of air and fire
The salamander
a lizard
her tongue ends in a dart
54

wasps nest of suns

red word of beginning

her tail ends in a dart

She is unhissable
She is unsayable
she rests upon hot coals
queens it over firebrands
If she carves herself in the fame
she burns her monument
Fire is her passion, her patience
Salam ander

Salamater

[D.L.]

Happiness in Herat

For Carlos Pellicer

I carne here
as I write these lines,
at random:
a blue-and-green mosque,
six truncated minarets,
two or three tombs,
memories of a poet-saint,
the ames of Tim ur and his lineage.
I met the wind of the hundred days.
It spread sand over all the nights.
It scourged my brow, scorched my lids.
Daybreak:
dispersin of birds
and that sound of water among stones
which is the peasants footsteps.
(But the water tasted of dust.)
M urmurs in the plain,
appearances
disappearances,
ocher whirlwinds
insubstantial as my thoughts.
Wheeling and wheeling
55

in the hotel room, on the hills:

this land a camels graveyard
and in my brooding
always the same crumbling faces.
Is the wind, the lord of ruins,
my only master?
Erosions:
minus grows more and more.
At the saints tomb
I nailed a nail
deep into the lifeless tree,

not,
like the others, against the evil eye:
against myself.
(I said something
words the wind took away.)
One afternoon the heights convened.
The poplars walked around
while standing still.
Sun on the glazed tiles
sudden springtimes.
In the Ladies Garden
I climbed to the turquoise cupola.
M inarets tattooed with characters:
that Cufie script became clear
beyond its meaning.
I did not have the visin without images,
I did not see forms whirl till they disappeared
in immobile clarity,
in the Sufis being-without-substance.
I did not drink plenitude in vacuity
or see the two and thirty signs
of the Bodhisattvas diamond-body.
I saw a blue sky and all the shades of blue,
and the white to green
of the spread fan of the poplars,
and, on the tip of the pine tree,
the black-and-white ouzel,
56

less bird than air.

I saw the world resting upon itself.
I saw the appearances.
And I named that half-hour:
Perfection of the Finite.

[L.K.]

Apparition
If man is dust
those who go through the plain
are men

[C.T.

In the Lodi gardens

For Claude Esteban

The black, pensive, dense

domes of the mausoleums
suddenly shot birds
into the unanimous blue

[E.W.]

57

The other
He invented a face for himself.

Behind it,
he lived, died, and was resurrected
many times.
Today his face
has the wrinkles of that face.
His wrinkles have no face.

Vrindaban
Surrounded by night
immense forest of breathing
vast impalpable curtains
murmurs
I write
I s to p

I write

(All is and is not

and it all falls apart on the page
in silence)
A m om ent ago
a c a r r a c e d d o w n th e S tr ee t
a m o n g th e e x t in g u is h e d h o u s e s

I raced
among my lighted thoughts
Above me the stars
such quiet gardens
I was a tree and spoke
58

[E.W.]

was covered with leaves and eyes

was the rum or pushing forward
a swarm of images
(I set down now a few
twisted strokes
black on white
diminutive garden of letters
planted in the lam ps light)
The car raced on
through the sleeping suburb
to follow my thoughts

I raced

mine and others

Reminiscences left-overs imaginings
ames
The remains of sparks
the laughter of the late parties
the dance of the hours
the m arch of the constellations
and other commonplaces
Do I believe in man
or in the stars?
I believe
(with here a series
of dots)
I see
A portico of weather-eaten pillars
statues carved by the plague
a double line of beggars
and the stench
a king on his throne
surrounded
by a coming and going of aromas
as if they were concubines
pur almost corporeal undulating
from the sandalwood to the jasmine
and its phantoms
59

Putrefaction

fever of forms

fever of time
ecstatic in its combinations
The whole universe a peacocks tail
myriads of eyes
other eyes refiecting
modulations
reverberations of a single eye
a solitary sun
hidden
behind its cloth of transparencies
its tide of marvels
Everything was flaming
stones women water
Everything sculptured
from color to form
from form to fire
Everything was vanishing
Music of wood and metal
in the cell of the god
womb of the temple
Music
like the wind and water embracing
and over the entwined sounds
the hum an voice
a moon in heat at midday
stela of the disembodied soul
(I write without knowing the outcome
of what I write
I look between the lines
My image is the lamp
lit
in the middle of the night)
ape of the Absolute
pothook
60

M ountebank
cowering

covered with pal ashes

a sadhu looked at me and laughed
watching me from the other shore
far oT, far o
watching me like the animals like the saints
Naked uncombed smeared
a fixed ray a mineral glitter his eyes
I wanted to speak to him
he answered with a rumble of bowels
Gone gone
Where?
To what regin of being
to what existence
in the open air of what worlds
in what time?
(I write
each letter is a germ
The memory
imposes its tide
and repeats its own midday)
Gone gone

Saint scoundrel saint

in beatitudes of hunger or drugs
Perhaps he saw Krishna
sparkling blue tree
dark fountain splashing amid the drought
Perhaps in a cleft stone
he grasped the form of woman
its rent
the formless dizziness
For this or that
he lives on the ghat where they burn the dead
The lonely streets
the houses and their shadows
All was the same and all diTerent
The car raced on
I was quiet
61

among my runaway thoughts

(Gone gone
Saint clown saint beggar king dam ned
it is the same
always the same
within the same
It is to be always within oneself
closed up in the same
Closed up on oneself
rotted idol)
Gone
gone
he watched me from the other shore

he watches me
from his interminable noon
I am in the wandering hour
The car races on among the houses
I write by the light of a lamp
The absolutes the eternities
their outlying districts
are not my theme
I am hungry for life and for death also
I know what I know and I write it
The embodiment of time
the act
the movement in which the whole being
is sculptured and destroyed
Consciousness and hands to grasp the hour
I am a history
a memory inventing itself
I am never alone
I speak with you always
you speak with me always
I move in the dark
I plant signs

62

[L.K.]

Village
The stones are time
centuries of wind

The wind

The trees are time

the people are stone
The wind
turns upon itself and sinks
into the stone day

There is no water here for all the luster of its eyes

[C.T.]

Daybreak
Hands and lips of wind
heart of water
eucalyptus
campground of the clouds
the life that is born every day
the death that is born every life
I rub my eyes:
the sky walks the land

[E.W.]

63

Nightfall
W hat sustains it,
half-open, the clarity of nightfall,
the light let loose in the gardens?
All the branches,
conquered by the weight of birds,
lean toward the darkness.
Pur, self-absorbed moments
still gleam
on the fences.
Receiving night,
the groves become
hushed fountains.
A bird falls,
the grass grows dark,
edges blur, lime is black,
the world is less credible.

On reading John Cage

Read

unread:

Music without measurements,

sounds passing through circumstances.

I hear them within me

I see them outside me
64

passing outside,

passing within me.

[E.W.]

I am the circumstance.
Music:
I hear within what I see outside,
I see within what I hear outside.
(I cant hear myself hearing: Duchamp.)
an architecture of sounds
instantaneous
on
a space that disintegrates itself.
we come across is to the point.)

invents silence,
invents space.
Silence

I am

(.Everything

Music

architecture

Faetones of air.

is the space of music:

an unextended
space:
there is no silence
save in the mind.
Silence is an idea,
the ide fixe of music.
Music is not an idea:
it is movement,
sounds walking over silence.
{Not one sound fears the silence

Silence is music,

That extinguishes it.)

music is not silence.

Nirvana is Samsara,
Samsara is not Nirvana.
Knowing is not knowing:
recovering ignorance,
knowledge of knowing.
It is not the same thing to hear
the footsteps of this afternoon
between the trees and houses
as it is

65

to see this same afternoon now

between the same trees and houses
Silence:

Nirvana is Samsara,

(Let life obscure

after having read

silence is music.

the difference between art and life.)

Music is not silence:

what silence says,

it is not saying

it is saying
what it doesnt say.
Silence has no sense,
sense has no silence.
W ithout being heard
music slips between both.
(Every something is an echo o f nothing.)

In the silence of my room

unheard.

the m urm ur of my body:

One day I shall hear its thoughts.

stands still:

yetit walks.
My body hears the body of my wife
and responds to it:
Music is real,

The afternoon

(a cable o f sound)

this is called music.

silence is an idea.
John Cage is Japanese
and is not an idea:
he is sun on snow.
Sun and snow are not the same:
sun is snow and snow is snow
or
sun is not snow and snow is not snow
or
John Cage is not American
66

(U.S.A. is determined to keep the Free World free,

U.S.A. determined)

or
John Cage is American

(ithat the U.S.A. may become

just another part of the world.
No more, no less.)
Snow is not sun,
sun is snow,

music is not silence,

silence is music.

( The situation must be Tes-and-No,

Between silence and music,

snow and sun

not either-or)

art and life,

there is a man.
This man is John Cage
to the nothing in between).

not snow not sun,

which is not

(committed

He says a word:

one word

silence:

A year from Monday you will hear it.

The afternoon has become invisible.

[M.F.W . and G.A.]

Writing
I draw these letters
as the day draws its images
and blows over them
and does not return

[E.W.]
67

Concord

For Carlos Fuentes

W ater above
Grove below
W ind on the roads
Q uiet well
Buckets black
Spring water
W ater coming down to the trees
Sky rising to the lips

[E.W.]

Exclamation
Stillness

not on the branch

in the air
not in the air
in the moment
hummingbird

68

[E.W.

Wind from all compass points

The present is motionless
The mountains are of bone and of snow
they have been here since the beginning
The wind has just been born
ageless
as the light and the dust
A windmill of sounds
the bazaar spins its colors
bells motors radios
the stony trot of dark donkeys
songs and complaints entangled
among the beards of the merchants
the tall light chiselled with hammer-strokes
In the clearings of silence
boys cries
explode
Princes in tattered clothes
on the banks of the tortured river
pray
pee
meditate
The floodgates of the year open

The present is motionless

day flashes out

agate
The fallen bird
between ru M ontalam bert and ru de Bac
is a girl
held back
at the edge of a precipice of looks
If water is fire
fame
dazzled
in the center of the spherical hour
a sorrel filly
A marching battalion of sparks
a real girl
69

among wraithlike houses and people

Presence a fountain of reality
I looked out through my own unrealities
I took her hand
together we crossed
the four quadrants the three times
floating tribes of reflections
and we returned to the day of beginning
The present is motionless
June 21 st
today is the beginning of summer
Two or three birds
invent a garden
You read and eat a peach
on the red couch
naked
like the wine in the glass pitcher
A great flock of crows
O ur brothers are dying in Santo Domingo
If we had the munitions
You people would not be here
We chew our nails down to the elbow
In the gardens of his summer fortress
Tipoo Sultn planted the Jacobin tree
then distributed glass shards among
the imprisoned English officers
and ordered them to cut their foreskins
and eat them
The century
has set fire to itself in our lands
Will the builders of cathedrals and pyramids
charred hands
raise their transparent houses
by its light?
The present is motionless
The sun has fallen asleep between your breasts
The red covering is black and heaves
Not planet and not jewel
fruit
70

you are named

date

Datia
castle of Leave-If-You-Can

scarlet stain
upon the obdurate stone
Corridors
terraces
stairways
dismantled nuptial chambers
of the scorpion
Echoes repetitions
the intricate and erotic works of a watch

beyond time

taciturn patios under the pitiless afternoon

a cloak of needles on your untouched shoulders
If fire is water
you are a diaphanous drop
the real girl
transparency of the world

You cross

The present is motionless

The mountains
quartered suns
petrified storm earth-yellow
The wind whips
The sky is another deeper abyss

it hurts to see

Gorge of the Salang Pass

black cloud over black rock
Fist of blood strikes
gates of stone
Only the water is human
in these precipitous solitudes
Only your eyes of human water
Down there
in the cleft
desire covers you with its two black wings
Your eyes lash open and cise
phosphorescent animals
71

Down there

the hot canyon

the wave that stretches and breaks
the plunging whiteness
the foam of our bodies abandoned

your legs apart

The present is motionless

The hermit watered the saints tomb
his beard was whiter than the clouds
Facing the mulberry
on the flank of the rushing stream
you repeat my ame
dispersin of syllables
A young man with green eyes presented you
with a pomegranate
O n the other bank of the Amu-Darya
smoke rose from Russian cottages
The sound of an Usbek ilute
was another river invisible clearer
The boatman
on the barge was strangling chickens
The countryside is an open hand
its lines
marks of a broken alphabet
Cow skeletons on the prairie
Bactria
a shattered statue
I scraped a few ames out of the dust
By these fallen syllables
seeds of a charred pomegranate
I swear to be earth and wind
whirling
over your bones
The present is motionless
Night comes down with its trees
night of electric insects and silken beasts
night of grasses which cover the dead
meeting of waters which come from far off
72

rustlings

universes are strewn about

a world falls
a seed fiares up
each word beats
I hear you throb in the shadow
a riddle shaped like an hour-glass
woman asleep
Space living spaces
Anima mundi
m aternal substance
always torn from itself
always falling into your empty womb
Anima mundi
mother of the nomadic tribes
of suns and men
The spaces turn
the present is motionless
At the top of the world
Shiva and Parvati caress

Each caress lasts a century

for the god and for the man
an identical time
an equivalent hurling headlong
Lahore
red river black boats
a barefoot girl
between two tamarinds
and her timeless gaze
An identical throbbing
death and birth
A group of poplars
suspended between sky and earth
they are a quiver of light more than a trembling of leaves
Do they rise
or fall?
The present is motionless

It rains on my childhood
73

it rains on the feverish garden

flint flowers trees of smoke
In a fig-leaf you sail
on my brow
The rain does not wet you
you are fame of water
the diaphanous drop of fire
spilling upon my eyelids
I look out through my own unrealities
the same day is beginning
Space wheels
the world wrenches up its roots
O ur bodies
stretched out
weigh no more than dawn

[P.B.]

Madrigal
More transparent
than this water dropping
through the vines twined fingers
my thought stretches a bridge
from yourself to yourself
Look at you
truer than the body you inhabit
fixed at the center of my mind
You were born to live on an island

74

[E.W.]

With eyes closed

W ith eyes closed
you light up within
you are blind stone
Night after night I carve you
with eyes closed
you are frank stone
We have become enormous
just knowing each other
with eyes closed

[E.W.]

Transit
Lighter than air
than lips

than water

light light

Your body is the footprint of your body

[L.K.

75

Maithuna
My eyes discover you
naked
and cover you
with a warm rain
of glances
A cage of sounds
to the morning

open

whiter
than your thighs
at night
your laughter
and more your foliage
your blouse of the moon
as you leap from bed
Sifted light

the singing spiral

spools whiteness
Chiasm
X
planted in a chasm
My day

exploded
in your night
Your shriek
leaps in pieces
Night
spreads
your body
washing under
your bodies
76

knot
Your body once again
Vertical hour

drought
spins its flashing wheels
Garden of knives
feast of deceit
Through these reverberations
you enter
unscathed
the river of my hands
Quicker than fever
you swim in darkness
between caresses
You leap

your shadow clearer

your body blacker

to the bank of the improbable

toboggans of how when because yes
Your laughter burns your clothes
your laught
soaks my forehead my eyes my reasons
Your body burns your shadow
You swing on a trapeze of fear
the terrors of your childhood
watch me
from your cliThanging eyes
wide-open
making love
at the clifF
Your body clearer
Your shadow blacker
You laugh over your ashes

Burgundy tongue o the flayed sun

tongue that licks your land o sleepless dunes
hair unpinned
tongue o whips
spoken tongues
unfastened on your back
enlaced
on your breasts
writing that writes you
with spurred letters
denies you
with branded signs
dress that undresses you
writing that dresses you in riddles
writing in which I am buried
H air unpinned
the great night swift over your body
ja r o hot wine
spilled
on the tablets o the law
howling nude and silent cloud
cluster o snakes
cluster o grapes
trampled
by the coid soles o the moon
rain o hands leaves fingers wind
on your body
on my body on your body
H air unpinned
foliage of the tree of bones
the tree of aerial roots that drink night from the sun
The tree of flesh
The tree of death
Last night

in your bed
we were three:
the moon
you & me

78

I open

the lips o your night

dam p hollows
unborn
echoes:
a rush

whiteness
of unchained water

To sleep to sleep in you

or even better to wake
to open my eyes
at your center
black white black
white
To be the unsleeping sun
your memory ignites
(and
the memory of me in your memory

And again the sap skywise

rises
(salvia your ame
is fame)
Sapling
crackling
(rain
of blazing snow)
My tongue
is there
(Your rose
burns through the snow)
is
now
(I seal your sex)
dawn
from danger drawn

[E.W.]
79

The key of water

After Rishikesh
the Ganges is still green.
The glass horizon
breaks among the peaks.
We walk upon crystals.
Above and below
great gulfs of calm.
In the blue spaces
white rocks, black clouds.
You said:

Le pays est plein de sources.

T hat night I dipped my hands in your breasts.

[E.B.]

Sunday on the island of Elephanta

IMPRECATION

At the feet of the sublime sculptures,

disfigured by the Muslims and the Portuguese,
the crowds have left a picnic of garbage
for the crows and dogs.
I condemn them to be reborn a hundred times
on a dungheap,
and as for the others,
for eons they must carve living flesh
in the hell for the mutilators of statues.

80

INVOCATION

Shiva and Parvati:

not as gods

we worship you

but as images
of the divinity of man.
You are what m an makes and is not,
what man will be
when he has served the sentence of hard labor.
Shiva:
your four arms are four rivers,
four jets of water.
Your whole being is a fountain
where the lovely Parvati bathes,
where she rocks like a graceful boat.
The sea beats beneath the sun:
it is the great lips of Shiva laughing;
the sea is ablaze:
it is the steps of Parvati on the waters.
Shiva and Parvati:
the woman who is my wife
and I
ask you for nothing, nothing
that comes from the other world:
only
the light on the sea,
the barefoot light on the sleeping land and sea.

[E.W.]

81

Blanco
Blanco: white; blank; an unmarked space; emptiness; void; the white

mark in the center of a target.

As it is not possible to reproduce here all of the characteristics of the
original edition of the poem, it should be mentioned that Blanco was
meant to be read as a succession of signs on a single page. As the
reading progresses, the page unfolds vertically: a space which, as it
opens out, allows the text to appear and, in a certain sense, creates it. It
is something like the motionless voyage oTered by a roll of Tantric
pictures and emblems: as we unroll it, a ritual is spread out before our
eyes, a sort of procession or pilgrimage towhere? Space flows,
engenders a text, dissolves itit passes as though it were time. This
arrangement of temporal order is the form adopted by the course of the
poem: its discourse corresponds to another which is spatial: the
separate parts which comprise the poem are distributed like the
sections, colors, symbols, and figures of a mandala. . . . The typography and format of the original edition of Blanco were meant to
emphasize not so much the presence of the text but the space that
sustains it: that which makes writing and reading possible, that in
which all writing and reading end.
Blanco is a composition that ofTers the possibility of variant readings:

a) in its totality, as a single text;

b) the center column, excluding those to the left and right, is a poem
whose theme is the passage of the word from silence to silence, passing
through four stages; yellow, red, green, and blue;
c) the lefthand column is a poem divided into four moments corresponding to the four traditional elements;
d) the righthand column is another poem, in counterpoint to the left,
and composed of four variations on sensation, perception, imagination
and understanding;
e) each of the four parts formed by the two columns may be read,
ignoring the divisin, as a single textfour independent poems;
f) the center column may be read as six separate poems; those of the left
and right as eight.

82

By passion the world is bound,

by passion too it is released.

The Hevajra Tantra

Avec ce seul objet dont le

Nant shonore.

Stphane Mallarm

a stirring

a starting
a seedling
still sleeping
a word at the tongues tip
unheard
inaudible
incomparable
fertile
arid
ageless
she buried with open eyes
blameless
promiscuous
the word
speechless
nameless
Climbing and descending
the mineshaft ladder:
deserted language.
A lamp beats
beneath penum bra skin.
Survivor
amidst sullen confusions,
it rises
on a copper stem,
resolves
into a foliage of clarities:
retreat
for fallen realities.
Asleep
or extinct,
high on its pole
(head on a pike)
a sunflower
charred light
above a vase
83

of shadow.

In the palm
of a fictitious hand,
a fiower
not seen or thought:
heard,
appears,
a yellow
chalice of consonants and vowels,
all burning.

the shadow of the fire on the wall fam e circle by lions

your shadow and mine in the fire lioness in the circus o f the flames
soul amidst sensations

the fire knots and unlaces you

fireworks fruit
Bread Grail Coal
Girl
the senses open
in the magnetic night
you laughnaked
in the gardens of the fame
The passion of compassionate coals
A pulse-beat, insisting,
a surge of wet syllables.
W ithout saying a word
my forehead grows dark:
a presentiment of language.
Patience patience

(Livingston in the drought)

River rising a little.

Mine is red and is scorched

between flaming dunes:
Spanish castles of sand, shredded playing cards,
and the hieroglyph (coal and water)
fallen on the chest of Mxico.
I am the dust of that silt.
River of blood,
river of histories
84

of blood,

dry river:
mouth of the source

gagged
by an anonymous conspiracy
of bones,
by the grim rock of centuries
and minutes:
language
is atonement,
an appeasement
of him who does not speak,
entombed,
assassinated
every day,
the countless dead ones.
To speak
while others work
is to polish bones,
to sharpen
silences
to transparency,
to undulation,
the whitecap
to water:

the rivers of your body

country of pulse-beats
to enter you
country of closed eyes
water without thoughts
to enter me
entering your body
country of sleepless mirrors
country of waking water
in the sleeping night

the river o f bodies

stars reptiles microorganisms
torrent of sleepwalking cinnabar
surge of gene alogies
games conjugations mimicries
subject and object abject and absolved
river o f suns
((the tall beasts with shining skin
seminal river o f the worlds wheeling
the eye that watches it is another river

what I see is my creation

watching I watch myself
as if to enter through my eyes perception is concept ion

85

into an eye more crystal clear water o f thoughts

what I watch watches me
I am the creation o f what I watch
delta of the arms of desire
water o f truth
on a bed of vrtigo
truth o f water
Transparency is all that remains
Desert burning
from yellow to flesh color:
the land is a charred language.
There are invisible spines, there are
thorns in the eyes.
Three satiated vultures
on a pink wall.
It has no body no face no soul,
it is everywhere,
crushing all of us:
this sun is unjust.
Rage is mineral.
Colors
are relentless.
Unrelenting horizon.
Drumbeats drum beats drumbeats.
The sky blackens
like this page.
Scattering of crows.
Im pending violet violences.
The sand whirls up,
thunderheads, herds of ash.
The chained trees howl.
Drumbeats drum beats drumbeats.
I pound you sky,
land I pound you.
O pen sky, closed land,
ilute and drum, lightning and thunder,
I open you, I pound you.
You open, land,
your mouth filled with water,
your body gushes sky,
86

you crack, land,

and burst,
your seeds explode,
the word grows green.

unlaces spreads arid undulation

rises erects into an Idol between arms o f sand
naked as the mind shies multiplies self-denies
in the reverberation of desire is reborn escapes in self-pursuit
turning turning visin o f hawk-thought
around a black idea goat in the rock cleft
fleece at the joining naked place
in a naked woman snapshot o f a pulse-beat o f time
firefly tangle of beings real unreal quiet vibrating
unmoving beneath the sun unmoving burnt meadow
the color of earth color o f sun on sand
the grass of my shadow on the joining place
my hands of rain darkened by birds
on your green breasts holiness enough
woman stretched out made in the image o f the world
The world a bundle of your images
From yellow to red to green,
a pilgrimage to the clarities,
the word peering out from blue
whirlpools.
The drunk ring spins,
the ive senses spin
around the centripetal
amethyst.
Dazzlement:
I dont think, I see
not what I see,
but the reflections, the thoughts I see.
The precipitations of music,
crystallized number.
An archipelago of signs.
87

Lucidity,

mouth of truths,
clarity eaced in a syllable
translucid as silence:
I dont think, I see
not what I think,
blank face, forgetfulness,
the radiant void.
I lose my shadow,
I move
through impalpable forests,
quick sculptures of the wind,
endless things,
filed defiles,
I move,
my steps
dissolve
into a space that evaporates
into thoughts I dont think.

you fall from your body to your shadow not there but in my eyes
in an unmoving falling of waterfall sky and earth joining
you fall from your shadow to your ame untouchable horizon
you drop through your likenesses I am your remoteness
you fall from your ame to your body the furthest point o f seeing
in a present that never ends imaginings o f sand
you fall in your stirring scattered fables of wind
overflowing my body I am the stela of your erosion
you divide yourself up like speech space a quartered god
you divide me into your divisions thought the altar and knife
belly theater of blood axis o f the solstices
arboreal ivy firebrand tongue of coolness the firmament is

male and female

the earth tremor of your buttocks the testimony of solar testicles

rain of your heels on my back thought phallus word womb
jaguar eye in the eyelash thicket space is body sign thought
the lesh-colored cleft in the brambles always two

syllables in love

the black lips of the prophetess O r a c l e

whole in each part you divide yourself spirals

transfigurations

the bodies of the instant are your body time world is body
thought dream incarnated seen touched dissolved
observed by my ears
sniffled by my eyes
caressed by my scent
heard by my tongue
eaten by my touch

unfolding horizon o f music

bridge hung between color and smell
aroma nakedness in the hands o f air
canticle o f flavors
feast o f mist

to inhabit your ame

to fall in your shriek with you

to depopulate your body

house o f the wind

The unreality of the watched

makes the watching real.
In the center
of the world of the body of the spirit
the cleft
the splendor
No
In the Whirlpool of disappearances
the whirlwind of appearances
Yes
The tree of ames
No
is a word
Yes
is a word
they are air nothing
they are
this insect
fluttering among the lines
of an unfinished
unfmishable
page
89

Thought

fluttering
among these words

They are
your footsteps in the next room
the birds that return
The neem tree that protects us

protects them
Its branches mute thunder
douse lightning
In its foliage the drought drinks water
They are
this night
(this music)
W atch it flow
between your breasts
falling on your belly
white and black
nocturnal spring
jasm ine and crows wing
tabla and sitar
No and Yes
together
two syllables in love
If the world is real

the word is unreal

If it is real the word
the world
is the cleft the splendor the whirl
No
the disappearances and the appearances
the tree of ames
are words
Speech

Real unreal

air they are nothing

unreal
makes silence real

90

Yes

Being still
is a strand of language
Silence
seal
scintilla
on the forehead
on the lips
before it evaporates
Appearances and disappearances
Reality and its resurrections
Silence rests in speech
The spirit
is an invention of the body
The body
is an invention of the world
The world
is an invention of the spirit
No
Yes
unreality of the watched
transparency is all that remains
Your footsteps in the next room
the green thunder
ripens
in the foliage of the sky
You are naked
like a syllable
like a fame
an island of flames
passion of compassionate coals
The world
bundle of your images
drowned in music
Your body
spilled on my body
seen
dissolved
makes the watching real
Delhi, 23 Ju ly-25 September, 1966

[E.W.]
91

The Grove
For Pere Gimferrer

Enormous and solid

beaten by the wind

but swaying,

but chained,
m urm ur of a million leaves
against my window.
Riot of trees,
surge of dark green sounds.
The grove,
suddenly still,
is a web of fronds and branches.
But there are flaming spaces
and, fallen into these meshes,
restless,
breathing
is something violent and resplendent,
an animal swift and wrathful,
a body of light among the leaves:
the day.
To the left, above the wall,

more idea than color,

a bit of sky and many clouds,
a tile-blue basin
bordered by big, crum bling rocks,
sand east down
into the funnel of the grove.
In the middle
thick drops of ink
spattered
on a sheet of paper inflamed by the west;
its black, there, almost entirely,
in the far southeast,
where the horizon breaks down.
The bower
92

turns copper, shines.

Three blackbirds
pass through the blaze and reappear,

unharm ed,
in the empty space: neither light or shade.
Clouds
on the way to their dissolution.
Lights are lit in the houses.
The sky gathers in the window.
enclosed in its four walls

The patio

grows more and more secluded.

Thus it perfects its reality.
And now the trash can,
the empty flower pot,
on the blind cement
contain nothing but shadows.
Space closes
over itself.
Little by little the ames petrify.
[E.B.]

Immemorial landscape
For Jos de la Colina

Airily flutters

slips
among branches trunks poles
lazily
hovers over
the high electric fruit
it falls
aslant
now blue
on the other snow
93

M ade
of the same immaterial as shadow
it casts no shadow
As dense
as silence
this snow
is snow, but it burns
drill quick tunnels
in a moment
riddled

Headlights
collapsed

Night

grows inward
grows night
Obstinate cars
go by
all
in diferent directions
to the same destination
O ne day
the streetlights will explode
from their iron stalks
One day
the bellowing river of engines
will be choked
One day
these houses will be hills
once more
the wind in the stones
will talk only to itself
Aslant
among the shadows
unshadow
will fall
almost blue
on the earth
The same as tonight
the million year od snow
94

[E.W.]

Trowbridge Street
I

Sun throughout the day

Nobody on the streets
Still no snow
A red tree

Coid throughout the

parked cars

but wind wind

still burns
in the chilled air
Talking to it I talk to you
2

I am in a room abandoned by language

You are in another identical room
O r we both are
o n a S tr ee t y o u r g la n c e has d e p o p u la t e d
The w o r ld
imperceptibly comes apart
Memory
decayed beneath our feet
I am stopped in the middle of this
unwritten line
3

Doors open and cise by themselves

enters and leaves our house
talks to itself talking to you

Air

Air
nameless in the endless corridor

Air

W ho knows who is on the other sido:*

tunis aiul turns in my empty skull
turns to air evervthing it touches

Air

Air

Air
with air-lingcrs seatters everything l say
I am the air you don't see
l ean't ojien your eyes
1 ean't cise the door
l'he air has turned si>liil
4

l'his hour lias the shape ol a pause

l ilis pause has your shape
You have the shape of a fountain made
not ot water but o time
Nl\ pieees bob
at the jet's tip
what 1 was am still am not
M\ lite is woightlcss
The past thins out
rlie futuro a little water in your eyes
5

Now you have a bridge-shape

Our i\x>m na\igates beneath your arehes
From voiir railing we watch us pass
You ripple with wind more light than body
l'he sun on the other bank
grows upside-down
Its roots buried deep in the sk\
We eould hide ourselves in its l'oliage
Build a bonfire with its branches
l'he da\ is habitable

The coid has immobilized the world

Space is made of glass
Glass made of air
The lightest sounds build
quick sculptures
Echoes multiply and disperse them
Maybe it will snow
The burning tree quivers
surrounded now by night
Talking to it I talk to you

[E.W.]

Objects & apparitions

For Joseph Cornell

Hexahedrons of wood and glass,

scarcely bigger than a shoebox,
with room in them for night and all its lights.
M onuments to every moment,
refuse of every moment, used:
cages for infinity.
Marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice,
pins, stamps, and glass beads:
tales of the time.
Memory weaves, unweaves the echoes:
in the four corners of the box
shadowless ladies play a hide-and-seek.
Fire buried in the mirror,
water sleeping in the agate:
solos ofjenny Colonne and Jenny Lind.
97

 One has to eommit a painting, said Degas,

the way one commits a crime. But you constructed
boxes where things hurry away from their ames.
Slot machine of visions,
condensation flask for conversations,
hotel of crickets and constellations.
Minimal, incoherent fragments:
the opposite of History, creator of ruins,
out of your ruins you have made creations.
Theater of the spirits:
objects putting the laws
of identity through hoops.
Grand Hotel de la Couronne : in a vial,
the three of clubs and, very surprised,
Thum belina in gardens of reflection.
A comb is a harp strummed by the glance
of a little girl
born dumb.
The reflector of the inner eye
scatters the spectacle:
God all alone above an extinct world.
The apparitions are manifest,
their bodies weigh less than light,
lasting as long as this phrase lasts.
Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes
my words became visible for a moment.

98

[E.B.]

Return

For Jos Alvarado

Its better not to go back to the village,
the subverted paradise silent.
in the shatter of shrapnel.

Ramn Lpez Velarde

Voices at the crners turn

voices
through the suns spread hand
almost liquid
shadow and light
The carpenter whistles
the iceman whistles
three ash trees
whistling in the plaza
The invisible
foliage of sounds growing
rising up
Time
stretched to dry on the rooftops
I am in Mixcoac
Letters rot
in the mailboxes
The bougainvillea
against the walls white lime
flattened by the sun
a stain a purple
passionate calligraphy
written by the sun
I am walking back
back to what I left
or to what left me
Memory
edge of the abyss
balcony
over the void
I walk and do not move forward
I am surrounded by city
99

lack body

I lack air

lack
the stone that is pillow and slab
the grass that is cloud and water
Spirit flickers
Noon
pounding fist of light
To collapse in an office
or onto the pavement
to end up in a hospital
the pain of dying like that
isnt worth the pain
I look back
that passerby
nothing now but mist
Germination of nightmares
infestation of leprous images
in the belly brains lungs
in the genitals of the college and the temple
in the movie houses
desires ghost population
in the meeting-places of here and there
this and that
in the looms of language
in memory and its mansions
teeming clawed tusked ideas
swarms of reasons shaped like knives
in the catacombs in the plaza
in the herm its well
in the bed of mirrors and in the bed of razors
in the sleepwalking sewers
in the objects in the store window
seated on a throne of glances
The vegetation of disaster
ripens beneath the ground

They are burning

millions and millions of od notes
100

in the Bank of Mxico

O n corners and plazas

on the wide pedestals of the public squares
the Fathers of the Civic Church
a silent conclave of puppet buToons
neither eagles or jaguars
buzzard lawyers
locusts
wings of ink sawing mandibles
ventriloquist coyotes
peddlers of shadows
beneicent satraps
the cacomistle thief of hens
the monument to the R attle and its snake
the altar to the mauser and the machete
the mausoleum of the epauletted cayman
rhetoric sculpted in phrases of cement
Paralytic architecture

stranded districts
rotting municipal gardens
mounds of saltpeter
deserted lots
camps of urban nomads
ants nests worm-farms
cities of the city
thoroughfares of scars
alleys of living flesh
Funeral Parlor
by a window display of cofFins
whores
pillars o f vain night

in the drifting bar

At dawn

the enormous m irror thaws

the solitary drinkers
contmplate the dissolution of their faces
The sun rises from its bed of bones
The air is not air
it strangles without arms or hands
101

Dawn rips the curtains

heap of broken words
on the dusty corners
Yesterdays news

City

W ind
turns the papers

more remte
than a cuneiform tablet smashed to bits
Cracked scriptures
languages in pieces
the signs were broken
atl
tlachinolli was split
..
,burnt
water
r
There is no center
plaza of congregation and consecration
there is no axis
the years dispersed
horizons disbanded
They have branded the city
on every door
on every forehead
the S sign
We are surrounded
Did I win or lose?

I have gone back to where I began

(You ask
what laws rule success and failure?
The songs o f the fishermen float up
from the unmoving riverbank

W ang Wei to the Prefect Chang

from his cabin on the lake
But I dont want
an intellectual hermitage
in San Angel or Coyoacn)
All is gain
if all is lost
I walk toward myself
102

toward the plaza

Space is within
it is not a subverted paradise
it is a pulse-beat of time
Places are confluences
flutters of beings
in an instantaneous space
W ind whistles
in the ash tree
fountains
almost liquid light and shadow
voices of water
shine flow are lost
a bundle of reflections
left in my hands
I walk without moving forward
We never arrive
Never reach where we are
Not the past
the present is untouchable

[E.W.]

In the middle of this phrase . . .

I am not at the crest of the world.
is not the stylites pillar,

The moment

time
doesnt rise from my feet,
doesnt burst
in my skull in a silent black explosion,
illumination the same as blindness.
I am on the sixth floor,
I am
in a cage hung from time.
103

Sixth loor:

clatter and surf,

battle of metis,
glasshatter,
engines with a rage now human.
is a disjointed m urmur,

The night

a body
self-embraeed, tearing itself apart.
fumbling to bind its pieces,

Blind,

it gathers
its broken ames and scatters them.
W ith lopped fingers
the city touches itself in dreams.
I am not at the crossroads:
is to go wrong.

to choose

I am
in the middle of this phrase.
Rum bling tumble,
my birthfall:

W here will it take me?

data and date,

calendar dismembered
in the hollows of my memory.
I am the sack of my shadows.

Descent
to the slack breasts of my mother.
W rinkled hills,
swabbed lava,
sobbing fields,
saltpeter meis.
Two workmen open the pit.
Crum bled
m outh of cement and brick.
The wracked box appears:
through the loose planks
104

the pearl-gray hat,

the pair of shoes,

the black suit of a lawyer.
Bones, buttons, rags:
sudden heap of dust
at the feet of the light.
Coid, unused light,
almost sleeping,
dawn light,
just down from the hills,
shepherdess of the dead.
T hat which was my father
fits in that canvas sack
a workman hands me
as my m other crosses herself.
Before it ends
the visin scatters:
I am in the middle,
hung in a cage,
hung in an image.
The beginning drifts oT,
the end vanishes.
There is neither start or finish:
I am in the pause,
I neither end or begin,
what I say
has neither hands or feet.
I turn around in myself
and always find
the same ames,
the same faces,
and never find myself.
My history is not mine:
a syllable from that broken phrase
the city in its circular fever
repeats and repeats.
City, my city,

aTronted stela,
dishonored stone,
ame spat out.
105

Your story is History:

masked as freedom,
orbitless star,

fate

errant,

a game
we all play without knowing the rules,
a game that no one wins,
a game without rules,
the whim of a speculative god,
a man
turned into a stuttering god.
O ur oracles
are aphasic speech.
O ur prophets
seers with glasses.
History:
coming and going
without beginning
without end.
No one has gone there,
no one
has drunk from the fountain
no one
has opened the stone eyelids of time,
no one
has heard the first word,
no one will hear the last,
the mouth that speaks it talks to itself,
no one
has gone down in the pit of the universes,
no one
has returned from the dungheap of the suns.
History:
dum p and rainbow.
Scale
to the high terraces:
seven notes
dissolved in clarity.
Shadowless words.
106

We didnt hear them, we denied them,

we were content with noise

we said they dont exist:

Sixth floor:
I am in the middle of this phrase:
where
will it take me?
M angled language.
Poet: gardener of epitaphs.

[E.W.]

The petrifying petrified

Deadland

Shadeadland cactideous nopalopolis

bonstony dushty mockedmire
empty socket
petrified fire
the sun did not drink the lake
the earth did not absorb it
the water did not vanish into the air
men were the executors of the dust
wind
swirled in the coid bed of fire
wind
chanted litanies of drought
in the tomb of water
wind
broken knife in the worn crter
wind
saltpeter whisper
The sun
solaortasoul centrotal soldonage

split
107

the word that carne down in tongues of fire

smashed
the account and the count of the years
the chant of the days
was a rain of scrap iron
slagheap of words
sand primers
crushed screams
hoofmuz zlebridlehar nessbit
whinning waning Cains
Abis in rubble
partisan assassins
pagan pedagogues
slick crooks
the woofs of the one-eyed dog
guide of the dead
lost
in the coils of the Navel of the Moon
Valley of Mxico
lava slobber

lips in eclipse

Rages rotten throne

obstinate obsidian
petrified
petrifying
Rage
broken tower
tall as a scream
smeared breasts
tense brow
greendry bloodsnot
Rage
nailed in a wound
ragerazor gazeblade
on a land of ties and spines

108

theater of clouds
mat of the moon
drum of rain

Circus of mountains
table of noon
garden of planets

balcony of breezes
seat of the sun
ball-game of the constellations
Bursting images
impaled images
the lopped hand leaps
the uprooted tongue leaps
the sliced breasts leap
the guillotined penis
over and over in the dust over and over
in the courtyard
they trim the tree of blood
the intelligent tree
The dust of stufed images
erown of snakes

The Virgin

The Flayed
The Felled-by-Arrows
The Crucified
The Hum m ingbird
winged spark
flowerbrand
The Fame
who speaks with words of water
O ur Lady
breasts of wine and belly of bread
oven
where the dead burn and the living bake
The Spider
daughter of air
in her house of air
spins light
109

spins centuries and days

wind

The R abbit

carved in the m irror of the moon

in the eye of the dog of the dead

in the overgrown well of origins
in the stone theater of memory

Images buried
fallen

whirlwinds of reflections

images
whirling in the circus of the empty eye
of red brown green

ideas

swarms of flies
ideas ate the deities
deities
became ideas
great bladders full of bile
the bladders burst
the idols exploded
putrefaction of the deities
the sanctuary was a dungheap
the dungheap a nursery
armed ideas sprouted
ideolized ideodeities
sharpened syllogisms
cannibal deities
ideas idotic as deities
rabid dogs
dogs in love with their own vomit

We have dug up Rage

The am phitheater of the genital sun is a dungheap
The fountain of lunar water is a dungheap
The lovers park is a dungheap
The library is a nest of killer rats
110

The university is a muck full of frogs

The altar is Chanfallas swindle
The brains are stained with ink
The doctors dispute in a den of thieves
The businessmen
fast hands slow thoughts
officiate in the graveyard
The dialecticians exalt the subtlety of the rope
The casuists sprinkle thugs with holy water
nursing violence with dogmatic milk
The ide fixe 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 jailers
present leeches
affront the living body of time
We have dug up Rage
On the chest of Mxico

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 crushing
the stones are crushing
within there is a water we drink
bitter water
water whetting thirst
W here is the other water?

[E.W.]
111

San Ildefonso nocturne

I
In my window night
another space:

invents another night,

carnival convulsed
in a square yard of blackness.
M om entary
confederations of fire,
nomadic geometries,
errant numbers.
From yellow to green to red,
the spiral unwinds.
Window:
magnetic pate of calis and answers,
high-voltage calligraphy,
false heaven/hell of industry
on the changing skin of the moment.
Sign-seeds:
they rise,

the night shoots them o,

bursting above,

still burning

fall

in a cone of shadow,

ram bling sparks,

spinning flames

reappear,

syllable-clusters,

that scatter,

smithereens once more.

The city invents and erases them.

112

I am at the entrance to a tunnel.

These phrases puncture time.
Perhaps I am that which waits at the end of the tunnel.
1 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 coid,
my feet coid,
but the alphabets are burning, burning.
Space
constructs and deconstructs itself.
The night insists,
the night touches my forehead,
touches my thoughts.
W hat does it want?
2

Empty streets, squinting lights.

the ghost of a dog

On a crner,

searches the garbage

for a spectral bone.
Uproar in a nearby patio:
cacophonous cockpit.
Mxico, circa 1931.
Loitering sparrows,
a lock of children
builds a nest
of unsold newspapers.
113

In the desolation

the streetlights invent

unreal pools of yellowish light.
Apparitions:
time splits open:
a lugubrious, lascivious clatter of heels,
beneath a sky o f soot
the flash o f a skirt.
Cest la mor ou la morte . . .

The indiferent wind

puls torn 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 m ortar 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 galleries of echoes,

past broken images:
our history.
Hushed nation of stones.
Churches,
114

dome-growths,

their facades
petrified gardens of symbols.

Shipwrecked
in the spiteful proliferation of dw arf houses:
humiliated palaces,
fountains without water,
afronted frontispieces.
Gumuli,
insubstantial madrepore,
accumulate
over the ponderous bulks,
conquered
not by the weight of the years
but by the infamy of the present.
vast as the earth:
court of echoes.

Zcalo Plaza,
diaphanous space,

There,
with Alyosha K and Julien S,

we devised bolts of lightning

against the century and its diques.
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,
giant worms.

the yellow trolleys,

Ss and Zs:
a crazed auto, insect with malicious eyes.
fruits within an arm s reach,

Ideas,
115

like stars,
The girandola is burning,
the scorched hasty frame.
of the towers beats

the adolescent dialogue,

The bronze fist

12 times.

bursts into pieces,

burning.

Night

gathers them by itself,

and becomes one, intact.
We disperse,
not there in the plaza with its dead trains,
on this page: petrified letters.

but here,

The boy who walks through this poem,

between San Ildefonso and the Zcalo,
is the man who writes it:
this page too
is a ramble through the night.
Here the friendly ghosts
become flesh,
ideas dissolve.
Good, we wanted good:

to set the world right.

We didnt lack integrity:
we lacked humility.
W hat we wanted was not innocently wanted.
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.
116

Some
became secretaries to the secretary
to the General Secretary of the Inferno.
became philosophy,

Rage

its drivel has covered the planet.

Reason carne down to earth,
took the form of a gallows
and is worshiped by millions.
Circular plot:
we have all been,
in the Great Flayhouse of the World,
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 zig-zag of the demonolatries and the androlatries,
bewitchments and aberrations:
my history.
Are they the histories of an error?
History is the error.
Further than dates,
closer than ames,
truth is that
which history scorns:
the everyday
everyones anonymous heartbeat,
the unique
beat of every one
the unrepeatable
117

everyday, identical to all days.

T ruth
is the base of 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 burn out when they are named.
Suns, words, stones,
burn and burn out:
the moment burns them
without burning.
Hidden, immobile, untouchable,
the presentnot its presencesis always.
Between seeing and making,
I chose the act of words:

contemplation or action,

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 ame,
dissolution
of the ame in a beyond of stones.
118

Poetry,

suspensin bridge between history and truth,

is not a path toward this or that:
it is to see
the stillness in motion,
change
in stillness.
History is the path:
it goes nowhere,
we all walk it,
truth is to walk it.
We neither go or come:
we are in the hands of time.
Truth:
to know ourselves,
from the beginning,
hung.
Brotherhood over the void.
4

Ideas scatter,

the ghosts remain:

truth of the lived and suffered.
An almost empty taste remains:
shared fury

time

time
shared oblivion

in the end transfigured

in memory and its incarnations.
W hat remains is
time as portioned body: language.
In the window,

battle simulacrum:
the commercial sky of advertisements

fiares up, goes out.

119

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 or idea:
once a goddess,
today an errant 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 darkness and its foliage
grow pal,
she flows through her shape,
rises,
falls,
scatters in herself,
ties

120

herself to her flowing,

she too is a body.

disperses in her form:

T ruth
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.

The horizon has become aquatic.
from the heights of this hour:
be a falling or a rising,
I cise my eyes,

It grows light.

To rush down

will dying

a sensation or a cessation?

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.

[E.W.]

121

A draft of shadows
Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fosterd alike by beauty and by fear . . .
W.W. The Prelude (I, 265-266)

Heard by the soul, footsteps

in the mind more than shadows,
shadows of thought more than footsteps
through the path of echoes
that memory invents and erases:
without walking they walk
over this present, bridge
slung from one letter to the next.
Like drizzle on embers,
footsteps within me step
toward places that turn to air.
ames: they vanish
in a pause between two words.
The sun walks through the rubble
of what Im saying; the sun
razes the places as they dawn,
hesitantly, on this page;
the sun opens my forehead,
balcony
perched within me.
I drift away from myself,
following this m eandering phrase,
this path of rocks and goats.
W ords glitter in the shadows,
and the black tide of syllables
covers the page, sinking
its ink roots
in the subsoil of language.
From my forehead I set out
toward a noon the size of time.
122

A banyans centuries of assault

on the vertical patience of a wall
last less than this brief
bifurcation of thought:
the seen and the foreseen.
Neither here not there,
through that frontier of doubt,
crossed only by glimmers and mirages,
where language recants,
I travel toward myself.
The hour is a crystal ball.
I enter an abandoned patio:
apparition of an ash tree.
Green exclamations,
wind in the branches.
On the other side, the void.
Inconclusive patio, threatened
by writing and its uncertainties.
I walk among the images
of an eye that has lost its memory.
I am one of its images.
The ash tree, sinuous liquid fame,
is a m urm ur rising
till it becomes a speaking tower.
Garden turned to scrub:
its fever invents creatures
the mythologies later copy.
Adobe, lime and time:
the dark walls that are and are not.
Infinitesimal wonders in their cracks:
the phantom mushroom, vegetable M ithridates,
the newt and its iery breath.
I am inside the eye: the well where,
from the beginning, a boy is falling,
the well where I recount the time
spent falling from the beginning,
the well of the account of my account,
where the water rises
and my shadow falls.
123

Patio, wall, ash tree, well,

dissolve into a clarity in the form of a lake.
A foliage of transparency
grows on its shore. Fortnate
rhyme of peaks and pyramids,
the landscape unfolds
in the abstract m irror of the architecture.
Scarcely drawn,
a kind of horizontal comma ( ^ )
between the earth and sky:
a solitary canoe.
The waves speak Nahuatl.
A sign flies across the heights.
Perhaps it is a date, conjunction of destinies:
bundle of reeds, the ornen of the pyre.
The flint and the cross, keys of blood:
have they ever opened the doors of death?
The western light lingers,
raising symmetrical fires
across the rug, changing
this scarlet book I skim
(engravings: volcanoes, temples,
and the feathered cloak stretched over the water:
Tenochtitln soaked in blood)
into a chimerical fame.
The books on the shelf now are embers
the sun stirs with its red hands.
My pencil rebels against dictation.
The lake is eclipsed
by the writing that ames it.
I fold the page. Whispers:
they are watching me
from the foliage of the letters.
My memory: a puddle.
A muddy mirror: where was I?
My eyes, without anger or pity,
look me in the eye
from the troubled waters
124

of the puddle my words evoke.

I dont see with my eyes: words
are my eyes. We live among ames;
that which has no ame
still does not exist:
Adam o f mud,
not a clay dol: a metaphor.
To see the world is to spell it.
M irror of words: where was I?
My words watch me from the puddle
of my memory. Syllables of water
shine in a grove of reflections,
stranded clouds, bubbles above a bottom
that changes from gold to rust.
Rippling shadows, flashes, echoes,
the writing not of signs, but of murmurs.
My eyes are thirsty. The puddle is Stoic:
the water is for reading, not drinking.
In the sun of the high plains the puddles evaprate.
Only some faithless dust remains,
and a few intestate relies.
W here was I?
I am where I was:
within the indecisive walls
of that same patio of words.
Abd al-Rahm an, Pompeii, Xicontencatl,
battles on the Oxus or on top of the wall
with Ernesto and Guillermo. Thousands of leaves,
dark green sculpture of whispers,
cage of the sun and the hum m ingbirds flash:
the primordial fig tree,
leafy chapel of polymorphous,
diverse and perverse rituals.
Revelations and abominations:
the body and its interwoven languages,
knot of phantoms touched by thought
and dissolved with a touch,
125

pillory of blood, ide fixe

nailed to my forehead.
Desire is the master of ghosts,
desire turns us into ghosts.
W e are vines of air on trees of wind,
a cape of ames
invented and devoured by fame.
The crack in the tree trunk:
sex, seal, serpentine passage
closed to the sun and to my eyes,
open to the ants.
T hat crack was the portico
of the furthest reaches of the seen and thought:
there, inside, tides are green,
blood is gren, fire green,
green stars burn in the black grass:
the green music of elytra
in the fig trees pristine night;
there, inside, fingertips are eyes,
to touch is to see, glances touch,
eyes hear smells;
there, inside is outside,
it is everywhere and nowhere,
things are themselves and others,
imprisoned in an icosahedron
there is a music weaver beetle
and another insect unweaving
the syllogisms the spider weaves,
hanging from the threads of the moon;
there, inside, space
is an open hand, a mind
that thinks shapes, not ideas,
shapes that breathe, walk, speak, transform
and silently evaprate;
there, inside, land of woven echoes,
a slow cascade of light drops
between the lips of the crannies:
light is water; water, diaphanous time
126

where eyes wash their images;

there, inside, cables of desire
mimic the eternities of a second
the m inds electric current
turns on, turns of, turns on,
flaming resurrections
of a charred alphabet;
there is no school there, inside,
it is always the same day, the same night always,
time has not yet been invented,
the sun has not grown od,
this snow is the same as grass,
always and never the same,
it has never rained, it always rains,
everything is being, and has never been,
a nameless people of sensations,
ames that search for a body,
pitiless transparencies, cages of clarity
where identity cancels itself in its likenesses,
difference in its contradictions.
The fig tree, its lies and its wisdom:
wonders of the earth
trustworthy, punctual, redundant
and the conversations with ghosts.
An apprenticeship with the fig tree:
talking with the living and the dead.
And with myself.
The years procession:
changes that are repetitions.
The way and the weight of time.
Dawn: more than light,
a vapor of clarity
changed into gravid drops
on the windowpanes and on the leaves:
the world grows thin in these vibrating geometries
until it becomes the edge of a reflection.
The day buds, breaking out among the leaves,
127

spinning over itself,

surging, again incarnate,
from the vacuum into which it falls.
Time is filtered light.
The black fruit bursts
in the flesh-colored blossoms,
the broken branch leaks sour, milky sap.
The fig trees metamorphosis:
burnt by autum n, translgured by autum ns light.
It rises through diaphanous spaces,
a bare black virgin.
The sky is a revolving lapis lazuli:
its continents wheel au ralenti,
geographies without substance.
Flames in the snow of the clouds.
The afternoon turns to burnt honey.
Silent landslide of horizons:
light falls from the peaks,
shadow overflows the plain.
By the light of a lam pnight now
mistress of the house,
and the ghost of my grandfather
now master of the night
I would penetrate silence,
bodiless body, time
without hours. Each night books,
transparent fever machines, raised within me
architectures built above an abyss.
A breath of the spirit creates them,
a blink of the eye tears them down.
I gathered wood with the others,
and wept from the smoke
of the horse-tamers pyre;
I wandered on the floating grove
the turbulent green Tagus dragged along:
the liquid thicket curling
behind the fleeing Galatea;
I saw, in bunches of grapes, the shades clustered
128

to drink the blood in the pit:

better to live as a peasant,

breaking clods o f dirt for a dogs ration,
than to rule this pal nation of the dead;

I was thirsty, I saw demons in the Gobi;

I swam in the grotto with the siren
(and later, in the cathartic dream,
fendendo i drappi, e mostravami 7 ventre,
quel mi svegli col puno che nuscia);
I engraved on my imaginary tomb:
Do not move this stone
M y only riches are bones:
those memorable freckled pears

found in V illaurrutias basket of words;

Garlos Garrote, eternal half-brother,
God save you, he cried, as he knocked me down,
and it was, in the mirrors of recurrent insomnia,
I myself who had wounded me;
Isis and Lucius the ass; Nemo and the squid;
and the books marked with the arms of Priapus,
read on diluvial afternoons,
body tense, eyes intent.
i>ames anchored in the bay
of my forehead: I write because the druid,
under the m urm uring syllables of the hymn,
ilex planted deeply on the page,
gave me the branch of mistletoe, the spell
that makes words flow from stone.
ames accumulate their images,
images their vaporous
conjectural confederations.
Clouds and clouds, a phantom gallop
of clouds over the peaks
of my memory. Adolescence,
land of clouds.
The big house,
stranded in clogged time.
The plaza, the great trees
129

where the sun nestled,

the tiny church: its belfry
only reached their knees,
but its double tongue of metal
woke the dead.
U nder the arcade, in military sheaves,
the cae, green lances,
sugar rifles;
at the portal, the magenta stall:
the coolness of water kept in the shade,
the ancestral palm-mats, knotted light,
and on the zinc counter
the m iniature planets
fallen from the meridian tree,
sloes and mandarins,
yellow heaps of sweetness.
The years turn in the plaza,
a Catharine wheel,
and do not move.
My words,
speaking of the house, split apart.
Rooms and rooms inhabited
only by their ghosts,
only by the rancor of the elderly
inhabited. Families,
breeding-grounds for scorpions:
as they give ground glass to dogs
with their pittance, so they nourish us with their hates
and the doubtful ambition of being someone.
They also gave me bread, gave me time,
open spaces in the corners of the days,
backwaters to be alone with myself.
Child among tactiturn adults
and their terrifying childishness,
child in passageways with tall doors,
rooms with portraits,
dim brotherhoods of the departed,
child survivor
130

of mirrors with no memory

and their people of wind:
time and its incarnations
resolved in the simulacra of reflections.
In my house there were more dead than living.
My mother, a thousand-year-old girl,
mother of the world, my orphan,
self-sacrificing, ferocious, stubborn, provident,
titmouse, bitch, ant, wild boar,
love letter with spelling mistakes;
my mother: bread Id slice
with her own knife each day.
U nder the rain,
the ash trees taught me patience,
to sing facing the violent wind.
A virgin who talked in her sleep, my aunt
taught me to see with eyes closed,
to see within, and through the wall;
my grandfather, to smile at defeat,
and for disasters: in affliction, conviction.
(This that I say is earth thrown over
your ame: let it rest softly.)
Between vomit and thirst,
strapped to the rack of alcohol,
my father carne and went through flames.
One evening of flies and dust,
we gathered, among the rails and crossties
of a railway station, his remains.
I could never talk to him.
I meet him now in dreams,
that blurred country of the dead.
We always speak of other things.
As the house crumbled, I grew.
I was (I am) grass,
weeds in anonymous trash.
Days,
like a free mind, an open book.
131

I was not multiplied by the envious mirrors

that turn men into things, things into numbers:
neither power or gain. or sanctity either:
heaven for me soon became an uninhabited piece of sky,
an adorable and hollow beauty.
SuFicient and changing presence:
time and its epiphanies.
God did not talk to me from the clouds;
from the leaves of the fig tree
my body spoke to me, the bodies of my body.
Instantaneous incarnations:
afternoon washed by rain,
light just coming out from the water,
the feminine mist of plants,
skin stuck to my skin: succubus!
as if time at last were to coincide
with itself, and I with it,
as if time and its two times
were one single time
that still was not time, a time
where always is now and anytime always ,
as if I and my double were one
and I was no longer.
Pomegranate of the hour: I drank sun, I ate time.
Fingers of light would part the foliage.
Bees humming in my blood:
the white advent.
The shot flung me
to the loneliest shore. I was a stranger
in the vast ruins of the afternoon.
Abstract vrtigo: I talked with myself,
I was double, time split apart.
Amazed at the m om ents peak,
flesh became wordand the word fell.
To know exile on the earth, being earth,
is to know mortality. An open secret,
an empty secret with nothing inside:
132

there are no dead, there is only death, our mother.

The Aztecs knew it, the Greeks divined it:
water is fire, and in its passage
we are only flashes of fame.
Death is the mother of forms . . .
Sound, the blindm ans cae of sense:
I write death and for a moment
I live within it. I inhabit its sound:
a pneumatic cube of glass,
vibrating on this page,
vanishing among its echoes.
Landscapes of words:
my eyes, reading, depopulate them.
It doesnt matter: my ears propagate them.
They breed there, in the indecisive
zones of language, the villages in the marsh.
They are amphibious creatures, they are words.
They pass from one element to another,
they bathe in fire, rest in the air.
They are from the other side.
I dont hear them: what do they say?
They dont say: they talk and talk.
I leap from one story to another on a
suspensin bridge of eleven syllables.
A body, living but intangible, the air
in all places always and in none.
It sleeps with open eyes,
it lies down in the grass and wakes up as dew,
it chases itself, talks to itself in tunnels,
is a bit that drills into mountains,
a swimmer in the rough seas of fire,
an invisible fountain of laments,
it lifts two oceans with a hand,
and walks through the streets, lost,
a word in limbo in search of meaning,
air that vanishes into air.
And why do I say all this?
To say that, at high noon,
133

the air was populated with phantoms,

sun coined into wings,
weightless change, butterflies.
Night fell. O n the terraee
the silenciary moon ofliciated.
A deaths-head, messenger
of the souls, the enchanting
enchanted by the camelias
and the electric light, was,
over our heads, a fluttering
of opaque conjurations. K ill it!
the woman shouted
and burned it like a witch.
Then, with a fierce sigh, they crossed themselves.
Scattered light, Psyche . . .
Are there messengers? Yes,
space is a body tattooed with signs, the air
an invisible web of calis and answers.
Animis and things make languages,
through us the universe talks with itself.
We are a fragment
accomplished in our unaccomplishment
of its discourse. A coherent
and empty solipsism:
since the beginning of the beginning
what does it say? It says that it says us.
It says it to itself. Oh madness o f discourse,
that cause sets up with and against itself!

From the m oments peak flung down

into an afternoon of sexual plants,
I discovered death.
And in death I discovered language.
The universe talks to itself,
but people talk to people:
there is history. Guillermo, Alfonso, Emilio:
the patio where we played was history,
134

it was history to play at death together.

The clouds of dust, the shouts, the tumbles:
gabble, not speech.
In the aimless give-and-take of things,
carried along by the revolutions of forms and times,
everyone battles with the others,
everyone rebels, blindly, against himself.
Thus, returning to their origin,
they pay for their injustice. (Anaximander)
The injustice of being: things suffer
one with the other and with themselves
for to be is the desire to be more,
to always be more than more.
To be time is the sentence; history, our punishment.
But it is also the proving-ground:
to see, in the blot of blood
on Veronicas cloth, the face
of anotheralways the other is our victim.
Tunnels, galleries of history:
is death the only exit?
The way out, perhaps, is toward within.
The purgation of language, history consuming itself
in the dissolution of pronouns:
not I am or I even more so
but more being without I.
In the center of time, there is no more time,
but motion become fixity, a circle
canceled by its revolutions.
Noon:
the trees in the patio are green flames.
The crackling of the last embers
in the grass: stubborn inseets.
Over the yellow meadows,
clarities: the glass footsteps of autumn.
A fortuitous meeting of reflections,
an ephemeral bird
enters the foliage of these letters.
The sun, in my writing, drinks the shadows.
135

Between the wallsnot of stone,

but raised by memory
a transitory grove:
reflective light among the trunks
and the breathing of the wind.
The bodiless god, the nameless god
whom we cali by empty ames
by the ames of the emptiness
the god of time, the god that is time,
passes through the branches
that I write. Dispersin of clouds
above a neutral mirror:
in the dissipation of the images,
the soul already is, vacant, pur space.
M otion resolves in tranquility.
The sun insists, fastened
in the corolla of the absorbed hour.
Fame on the water-stalk
of the words that say it,
the flower is another sun.
Tranquility dissolves in itself. Time
elapses without elapse. It passes and stays. Perhaps
although we all pass, it neither passes or stays:
there is a third State.
A third State:
being without being, empty plenitude,
hour without hours and the other ames
with which it appears and vanishes
in the confluences of language.
Not the presence: its presentiment.
The ames that ame it say: nothing,
double-edged word, word between two hollows.
Its house, built on air
with bricks of Fire and walls of water,
constructs and deconstructs and is the same
from the beginning. It is god:
it inhabits the ames that deny it.
136

In the conversations with the fig tree

or in the pauses of speech,
in the conjuration of the images
against my closed eyelids,
in the delirium of the symmetries,
the quicksands of insomnia,
the dubious garden of memory,
or in the ram bling paths,
it was the eclipse of the clarities.
It appeared in every form
of vanishing.
Bodiless god,
my senses named it
in the languages of the body.
I wanted to ame it
with a solar ame,
a word without reverse.
I exhausted the dice box and ars combinatoria.
A rattle of dried seeds,
the broken letters of ames:
we have crushed ames,
we 'lave scattered ames,
we have dishonored ames.
Since then, I have been in search of the ame.
I followed a m urm ur of languages,
rivers between rocks
color ferrigno of these times.
Pyramids of bones, rotting-places of words:
our masters are garrulous and bloodthirsty.
I built with words and their shadows
a movable house of reflections,
a walking tower, edifice of wind.
Time and its combinations:
the years and the dead and the syllables,
diferent accounts from the same account.
Spiral of echoes, the poem
is air that sculpts itself and dissolves,
a fleeting allegory of true ames.
137

At times the page breathes:

the swarm of signs, the errant
republics of sounds and senses,
in magnetic rotation
link and scatter
on the page.
I am where I was:
I walk behind the m urm ur,
footsteps within me, heard with my eyes,
the m urm ur is in the mind, I am my footsteps,
I hear the voices that I think,
the voices that think me as I think them.
I am the shadow my words cast.

Fame, speech
I read in a poem:

to talk is divine.

But the gods dont speak:

they make and unmake worlds
while men do the talking.
They play frightening games
without words.
The spirit descends,
loosening tongues,
but doesnt speak words:
it speaks fire.
Lit by a god,
language becomes
a prophecy
of flames and a tower
of smoke and collapse
138

[E.W.]

of syllables burned:
ash without meaning.
The word of man
is the daughter of death.
We talk because we are mortal:
words are not signs, they are years.
Saying what they say,
the words we are saying
say time: they ame us.
We are times ames.
To talk is human.

[M.S.]

Sight, touch
For Balthus

Light holds between its hands

the white hill and black oaks,
the path that goes on,
the tree that stays;
light is a stone that breathes
by the sleepwalking river,
light: a girl stretching,
a dark bundle dawning;
light shapes the breeze in the curtains,
makes a living body from each hour,
enters the room and slips out,
barefoot, on the edge of a knife;
light is born a woman in a mirror,
naked under diaphanous leaves,
chained by a look,
dissolved in a wink;

139

it touches the fruit and the unbodied,

it is a pitcher from which the eye drinks clarities,
a fame cut in blossom, a candle watching
where the blackwinged butterfly burns;
light opens the folds of the sheets
and the creases of puberty,
glows in the fireplace, its flames become shadows
that climb the walls, yearning ivy;
light does not absolve or condemn,
is neither just or unjust,
light with impalpable hands raises
the buildings of symmetry;
light escapes through a passage of mirrors
and returns to light:
is a hand that invents itself,
an eye that sees itself in its own inventions.
Light is time reflecting on time.

[M.S.]

Homage to Claudius Ptolemy

(PALATINE ANTHO LOG Y 9.577)

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.
140

[E.W.]

Stars and cricket

The skys big.
Up there, worlds scatter.
Persistent,
Unfazed by such a night,
Cricket:
Brace and bit.

[E.W.]

Wind and water and stone

For Roger Caillois

The water hollowed the stone,

the wind dispersed the water,
the stone stopped the wind.
W ater and wind and stone.
The wind sculpted the stone,
the stone is a cup of water,
the water runs of 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.
W ind and water and stone.
One is the other, and is neither:
among their empty ames
they pass and disappear,
water and stone and wind.

[M.S.]
141

Epitaph for no stone

Mixcoac was my village. Three nocturnal syllables,
a half-mask of shadow across a solar face.
Clouds of dust carne and ate it.
I escaped and walked through the world.
My words were my house, air my tomb.

[E.W.]

This side

For Donald Sutherland

There is light. We neither see or touch it.

In its empty clarities rests
what we touch and see.
I see with my fingertips
what my eyes touch:
shadows, the world.
W ith shadows I draw worlds,
I scatter worlds with shadows.
I hear the light beat on the other side.
[E.W.]

142

Authors notes
[E D ITO R S NOTES IN BRACKETS]
OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY

Obsidian butterfly: Itzpaplotl, goddess sometimes confused

with Teteoinan, our mother, and Tonatzin. All of these female
divinities were fused in the cult which, since the 16th century,
has worshiped the Virgin of Guadalupe.
SUN STONE

The well-known Aztec calendar measured the synodical period

of the planet Venusfor the ancient Mexicans one of the
manifestations of the god Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent.
The calendar begins, as the poem does, at Day 4 Oln (Move
ment) and ends 584 days later at Day 4 Ehcatl (Wind), the
conjunction of the planet and the sun: the end of a cycle and
the beginning of another. Sun stone is composed of 584 lines of
eleven syllables each.
HAPPINESS IN HERAT

Memories of a poet-saint : the Sufi mystic and theologian

H azrat Khwaja Abdullah Ansar. There is an almost withered
tree in the garden which surrounds his tomb. Devotees drive
iron nails into the tree to ward off the evil eye and to cure
toothaches.
the turquoise cupola : on the mausoleum ofG ahar Shad, the
wife of Shah Rakh, the son of Tim ur, Governor of Herat.
the two and thirty signs : according to the M ahayana Sutras,
certain signs appear on the bodies of Boddhisattvas (the future
Buddhas), usually 32 in number. Nevertheless, the same texts
insist on the illusory nature of these signs: what distinguishes a
Boddhisattva from other beings is the absence of signs.

143

IN THE LODI GARDENS

The mausoleums of the Lodi Dynasty (1451-1526) in Delhi.

VRINDABAN

One of the sacred cities of Hinduism, on the outskirts of

M athura. According to legend, Krishna spent his childhood
and youth in the forest of V rindaban, now a barren plain,
producing wonders, seducing the cowgirls, and falling in love
with Radha.
sadhu : a wandering ascetic.
blue tree : Krishna is blue and black, like the M exican god
Mixcatl.
Perhaps is a cleft stone/ He grasped the form of a woman :
certain stones are symbols of the G reat Goddess, particularly
those whose form suggests a vulva (yoni).
Gone gone : the expression Gone gone to the O ther Shore
occurs frequently in the Prajnaparam ita Sutra. It means:
knowledge has crossed over from this bank, the phenomenal
world, to the other, Perfect Wisdom.
ON READING JO H N CAGE

The italicized quotations are from Cages book, A Tear from

Monday.

Nirvana is Sam sara/ Samsara is not N irvana : in M ahayana

Buddhist literature we find the formula Nirvana is Samsara,
Samsara is N irvana, which sums up one of the central ideas of
the M adhyam ika school: the ultim ate identity of phenomenal
(Samsara) and transcendental (Nirvana) reality. Both are merely
aspects of the void (Sunyata), and true wisdom transcends their
apparent duality. But the poem says something slightly different . . .
W IND FROM ALL COM PASS POINTS

If we had the m unitions/ You people would not be here :

M exican history schoolbooks attribute this statement to General
Anaya when he surrendered the Plaza de Churubusco to
144

General Scott, the head of the U.S. troops that invaded Mxico
in 1847.
Santo Domingo: the poem was written during the American
intervention in the Dominican Republic.
Tipoo Sultn planted the Jacobin tree : the facts referred to
here are historical.
Datia: the palace-castle in the walled city of the same ame, in
M adhya Pradesh. Built on a black, craggy promontory it
towers over the city and the plain. According to Fergusson, it is
the finest example of palace architecture in the 17th century.
Built by a prince pledged to the Em peror Jahangir, the castle
was never inhabited, except by bats and snakes: its owner was
assassinated before he could move in, and since then no one
else has dared try.
In a fig-leaf you sail : an allusion to the childrens book,
Almendrita ( Little Almond).
M AITH UNA

M aithuna: the erotic couples that cover the walls of certain

Buddhist and Hind temples; sexual unin; the path of illumination, in Tantric Buddhism and Hinduism, through the conjunction of karuna (passion) and prajna (wisdom). K aruna is
the masculine side of reality and prajna the feminine. Their
unin is sunyata, the void.
The seventh section of the poem is an imitation of Li Po.
SUNDAY ON THE ISLAND OF ELEPHANTA

The sculptures in the Shivaite caves of Elephanta (7th century)

are among the most beautiful in Indian art. The reliefs represent scenes from the legends of Shiva and Parvati. The religious
fervor of the Portuguese mutilated, but did not destroy, their
beauty.
RETURN

the pain of dying . . Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902).

whores/pillars : Crepsculos de la ciudad II [an untranslated early Paz poem].
145

 atl tlachinolli : a Nahuatl expression m eaning burnt (something)/w ater. The hieroglyph is often found on Aztec monuments. Alfonso Caso states that w ater also means blood, and
that burnt (something) alludes to fire. The opposition of
water and fire is a m etaphor of cosmic war, modeled, in turn,
on the wars between men. Cities and civilizations are founded
on an image: water and fire was the m etaphor of the foundation
of the city of Mxico. It is an image of the cosmos and man as a
vast contradictory unity.
Tragic visin: the cosmos is movement, and the axis of blood of
that movement is man. After wandering for some centuries, the
Mexica founded Mxico Tenochtitln precisely in the place
indicated in the auguries of their god Huitzilopochtli: the rock
in the lake; on the rock, a nopal, the plant whose fruit symbolizes hum an hearts; on the nopal, an eagle, the solar bird
that devours the red fruit; a snake; white water; trees and grass
that were also white . . .
IN THE M IDDLE OF TH IS PHRASE

unused light : Fray Luis de Lon, A Francisco de Salinas.

THE PETRIFYING PETRIFIED

the one-eyed dog : Xlotl, the double of Quetzalcoatl; the

god who, in penance, pulled out an eye and descended to the
underworld in the form of a dog.
"navel of the moon : Mxico is a word composed of metztli
(moon), xictli (navel) and co (place): the place of the navel of
the moon; that is, in the navel of the lake of the moon, as the
lake of Mxico was called.
Chanfalla: Cervantes, E l retablo de las maravillas.
SAN ILDEFONSO NO CTUR N E

Sky of soot : Ramn Lpez Velarde, Dia 13.'

C est la m ort : Grard de Nerval, Artmis.
146

A DRAFT OF SHADOWS

[The Spanish title, Pasado en claro, means clean copy (as

in the preparation of a manuscript) but with the added
resonance of pasado (past/passed) and claro (clear or
bright, in all their uses). The English title is a collaborative
invention.]
NO TE ON THE TRANSLATIONS

[As explained in the Introduction, the following changes have

been made in the translations to correspond to Pazs revisin of
the Spanish text: The Bird : one line deleted. In U xm al :
the first poem replaced by another. R iprap : an eighth poem
added. Hymn among the ruins : p. 23, lines 14-16 added.
The River : p. 29, lines 3-8 are a condensation and rearrangem ent of the earlier versin. W ind from all compass
points : p. 70, lines 29-34 added.]

147

(continuad from front flap)

sixty-seven selections in this volume, a
gathering n English of his most essential
poems drawn from nearly fifty years
work, are Muriel Rukeysers now classic
versin of Sun Stone and new trans
lations by editor Weinberger of Blanco
and Maithuna. And since for Paz, for
ever in motion, there can be no such
thing as a definitive text, all the poems
have been revised to conform to the
poets most recent changes in the orig
inal Spanish. Besides those by Rukeyser
and Weinberger, the translations in the
Selected Poems are by G. Aroul, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Lysander
Kemp, Denise Levertov, Mark Strand,
Charles Tomlinson, William Carlos Wil
liams, and Monique Fong Wust.
[Also availaible by Octavio Paz: Configucations, New Directions Paperbook 303;
A Draft of Shadows, NDP489; Eagle or
Sun? Cloth & NDP422; Early Poems
1935-1955, NDP354.]

Jacket photograph of Octavio Paz by Nina

Subin; design by Denise Breslin

NEW DIRECTIONS
80 Eighth Avenue
New York 10011

Some Other New Directions Books

Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths, Selected Stories &
Other Writings, New Directions Paperbook 186
Ernesto Cardenal: Apocalypse and Other Poems, Cloth
& NDP441; In Cuba, Cloth & NDP377; Zero Hour,
Cloth & NDP502
Vicente Huidobro: The Selected Poetry of Vicente
Huidobro, Cloth & NDP520
Enrique Lihn: The Dark Room and Other Poems, Cloth
&. NDP452 ;
Pablo Neruda: The Captains Verses, NDP345; Residence on Earth, NDP340
Nicanor Parra: Poems and Antipoems, Cloth

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