The present is perpetual
The mountains are of bone and snow
They’ve been here since the beginning
The wind has finished birthing
Without age
Like light and dust
Whirlpool of sound
The bazaar makes iridescent
Bells motors radios
The rocky trot of opaque donkeys
Songs and complaints entangled
In the merchants’ beards
Intense glow of hammer strikes sculpted
In the silent clearness
Explode
The cries of children
Princes in rags
On the bank of the tormented river
They pray urinate meditate
The present is perpetual
They open the floodgates of the year
The day leaps
Agate
The fallen bird
Between Montalambert and Bac street
A young woman
Is detained
Over a precipice of glances
If water is fire
Flame
In the center of the circular hour
Awestruck
Sorrel colored mare
A bundle of sparks
A royal young woman
Between houses and spectral crowds
Streaming presence of evidence
I saw her by means of my unreal acts
I took her by the hand
Together we cross
The four spaces and the three times
Small errant towns of reflections
And we return to the day of beginnings
The present is perpetual
21st. of June
Summer begins today
Two or three birds
Create a garden
You read and eat a peach
On a red quilt
Naked
Like wine in a glass pitcher
A great flight of ravens
In Santo Domingo our brothers expire
If there were a park you wouldn’t all be here
We gnaw at our elbows
In the gardens of your Summer fortress
Tipu Sultan planted the tree of the Jacobins
Later he distributed pieces of glass
Among official English prisoners
And ordained that they were to cut their foreskins
And to eat them
The century
Has ignited in our earths
With its fire
Burned hands
Builders of cathedrals and pyramids
Will raise their transparent houses
The present is perpetual
The sun has fallen asleep in your breasts
The red quilt is black and beating
Neither stars nor jewels
Fruit
You are called date
Datia
Castle of salt if you like
Scarlet stain
On the heavy rock
Galleries terraces staircases
Dismantled nuptial rooms
Of the scorpion
Repetitious echoes
Erotic watchmakers
At the wrong hour
You look around
The quiet patios under the impious afternoon
Cloak of needles in your unharmed shoulders
If fire is water
You are a diaphanous drop
The royal young woman
Transparency of the world
The present is perpetual
The mountains
Divided suns
Petrified ochre storm
The wind rips
To see pain
The sky is another abyss, taller
Garganta de Salang
The black cloud over the black rock
The fist of pulsing blood
Gates of stone
Only water is human
In these fallen solitudes
Your eyes alone of human water
Below
In space split in two
Desire covers you with its two black wings
Your eyes open and close
Phosphorescent animals
Below
The hot gorge
The wave that dilates and breaks
Your open legs
The white leap
The foam of our abandoned bodies
The present is perpetual
The Muslim monk watered the tomb of the saint
His beard was whiter than the clouds
Facing the just
At the flank of the storm
You repeated my name
Dispersion of syllables
A green-eyed adolescent
Gave you a pomegranate
At the other side of Amu-Darya
The small Russian house became humid
The sound of the Uzbek flute
Was another river, invisible and more pure
In the barge the boatman strangled chickens
The country is an open hand
Its lines
Signs of a broken alphabet
Skeletons of cows in the Bactrian plain
Statue pulverized
I collect the dust of a handful of names
For those fallen syllables
Grains of an ashen pomegranate
I swear to be earth and wind
I stir
Over your bones
The present is perpetual
The night enters with all its trees
Night of electric insects and thirsty beasts
Night of herbs that walk among the dead
Meeting of waters that come from afar
Murmurs
Universes come undone
A world falls
A seed ignites
Every word beats
I hear you knocking in the shadow
Enigma in the form of a clock of sand
Woman asleep
Space animated spaces
Anima mundi
Maternal matters
Perpetual unearthing of the self
And falling perpetuity in his empty entrails
Anima mundi
Mother of errant races
Of suns and men
Spaces emigrate
The present is perpetual
In the peak of the world Shiva
and Parvati caress each other
Each caress lasts a century
For the god and the man
One similar time
The same falling away
Lahor
Red river black boats
Between two tamarinds a girl goes barefoot
Watching without time
An identical pounding
Death and birth
Suspended between earth and sky
A few poplars
Vibrate from light more than their swaying of leaves
To climb or descend?
The present is perpetual
It rains over my childhood
It rains over the fevered garden
Flint flowers or trees of smoke
In a leaf of the fig tree you navigate
For my forehead
The rain doesn’t touch you
You are the flame of water
The diaphanous drop of fire
Spilled out over my eyelids
I see by means of my unreal acts
The same day that begins
Space gyrates
The world drags up its roots
Our outstretched bodies weigh less than the dawn.
Octavio Paz
No comments:
Post a Comment