Hymn Amongst Ruins




                                          where frothing the Sicilian sea . . .

                                                                                Gongora



Crowned with itself the day extends its feathers.
High yellow cry,
hot fountain in the center of an impartial and
kind sky!
Appearances are beautiful in their momentary truth.

The sea climbs the coast,
fortifies itself between crags, scratches dazzling;
the mountain’s purple wound shines;
a handful of goats is a herd of stones;
the sun adorns itself in an egg of gold and spills out over the sea.
Everything is God.
Broken statue,
living ruins in a world of the dead in life!

(The night falls on Teotihuacan.
On top of the pyramid the young smoke marijuana,
the rutting of guitars resounds.
What herb, what water’s life must give us life,
where the word is unearthed,
the proportion that guides the hymn, the discourse,
the dance, the city, and the balance?
The Mexican song explodes in a curse,
the star of colors extinguishing itself,
rock that closes to us the gates of contact.
Know that earth to earth will age.)

The eyes see, the hands touch.
Enough, here a few things:
prickly pear, thorny coral planet,
masked figs,
grapes with a taste for resurrection,
clams, surly virginities,
salt, cheese, wine, sun baked bread,
From the height of her brownness an islander looks at me,
svelte cathedral dressed in light.
Towers of salt, the white sails of boats
surge against the green pines of the river bank.
Light creates temples in the sea.

(New York, London, Moscow.
The shadow covers the plain with its ghostlike ivy,
with its vacillating shivering vegetation,
its sparse hairs, its throng of rats.
Here and there an anemic sun shudders.
Twisted in mountains that yesterday were cities, Polyphemus yawns.
Below, between the graves, a herd of men crawl.
(Domestic bipeds, their flesh
-- despite recent religious interdictions --
is very favored amongst the rich.
It was only recently that common men considered animals impure.)

To look, to touch beautiful shapes, every day.
The light buzzes; darts and wings.
The wine stain on the tablecloth reeks of blood.
Like the coral its branches in the water
I extend my senses in the living hour:
the instant expires in a yellow concordance,
oh melody, ear of corn filled with minutes,
cup of eternity!

My thoughts split in two, snake, get mixed up,
begin again,
at last they are immobilized, rivers that don’t flow,
delta of blood beneath a sun without twilight.
And everything must stop in this splashing of dead waters?

Day, circular day,
luminous orange of twenty-four slices,
all tinged with the same yellow sweetness!
Intelligence is finally brought to life,
the two enemies are reconciled to each other
and the conscience-mirror liquefies,
becomes a fountain, spring of fables:
Man, tree of images,
words that are flowers that are fruits that are acts.



Octavio Paz