It is a Saying



Disquieted in the lips’ rings and its feelings
The words wash themselves like swords
Noble defenders of the woman in fallen marble
The tragic deliriums explode in fever
Or in an obelisk of high deeds

The landscape swells in riches
But there are attenuating circumstances
For summer seated in mid-year
More real than last year’s women
He is the beautiful tunic of the monastery
At the hour of descending the stairs and the light
       that rolls around the streetlamps
Like an unfastened mane
For the marble and its sleeping siren within
For time and its wounds

Vicente Huidobro

                   Nocturne of Saint Ildefonso




                                       1



Invent the night in my window
                                                 other night,
other space:
                   fiesta convulsed
in a squared black meter.
                                             Momentous
confederations of fire,
                                   nomad geometries,
errant numbers.
                         From yellow to green to red
the spiral unravels.
                             Window:
magnetized plate of call and response,
calligraphy of high voltage,
lying sky/industrial inferno
over the changing skin of the instant.

Signs-seeds:
                   night fires at them,
they rise,
               they explode upwards,
                                                 they hasten,
burned already,
                      in a shadow’s cone,
                                                     they reappear,
wandering brilliance,
                                cluster of syllables,
blazes gyrating,
                        they disperse,
                                             fragments again.
The city invents and annuls them.

I am at the entrance to a tunnel.
These phrases perforate time.
Perhaps I wait at the end of that tunnel.
I speak with my eyes shut.
                                         Someone
has planted in my eyelids
a forest of magnetic needles,
                                            someone
guides the thread of these words.
                                            The page
has become an anthill.
                                   The void
established itself in my stomach’s mouth.
                                                                     I fall
endlessly in this void.
                                              I fall without falling.
I’ve got cold hands,
                              cold feet
-- but the alphabet burns, burns.
                                                 Space
forms and unforms.
                               Night insists,
night touches my forehead,
                                         touches my thoughts.
Who loves?


                                     2



Empty streets, one-eyed lights.
                                                  In a corner
the specter of a dog.
                                Search, in the garbage,
a ghostly bone.
                        Rowdy cock pit:
neighborhood patio and its commotion.
                                              Mexico, toward 1931.
Stray sparrows,
                        a group of children
with magazines that didn’t sell
                                                 make a nest.
The street lamps invent,
                                     in the sun’s sorrow
unreal puddles of yellow light.
                                                Apparitions,
time opens itself:
                          a mournful foot-tapping, lascivious:
under a soot filled sky
                                  the blaze of a skirt.
C’est la mort -- ou la mort . . .
                                             The indifferent wind
pulls from the walls lacerated notices.
In this hour
                 the red walls of Saint Ildefonso
are black and they breathe:
                                        sun made time,
time made rock,
                         rock made flesh.
These streets were canals.
                                     To the sun,
houses were silver:
                             city of lime and song,
moon fallen in the lake.
                                    The latinos rose up
over the blinded canal and the buried idol,
another city
                  -- not white: pink and gold --
idea made space, tangible number.
                                                      They seated it
in the cross of eight directions,
                                                their doors open
to the invisible:
                        sky and inferno.
Sleeping neighborhood.
                        We walk through the galleries of echos,
among broken images:
                                       our history.
Quiet nation of rocks.
                                 Churches,
vegetation of domes,
                                 their facades
petrified gardens of symbols.
                                          Run aground
in the bitter proliferation of dwarf houses,
humbled palaces,
                           waterless fountains,
offended appearances.
                                Cumulus,
insubstantial white coral:
                                 they accumulate
over the grave piers,
                                defeated
not by the sorrow of the years,
but by opprobrium of the present.

                                  Zocalo plaza,
vast as a firmament:
                                  diaphanous space,
pediment of echos.
                               There we invent,
among Alyosha K. and Julien S.,
                                      signs of lightning
face of the century and its small rooms.
                                     They drag us,
the wind of thought,
                                  the verbal wind,
the wind that plays with mirrors,
                                  master of reflections,
builder of cities of air,
                                   geometries
suspended by the thread of reason.

                                            Giant earthworms:
yellow streetcars extinguished,
                                      Those and squad cars:
a crazed auto, insect of malignant eyes.
                                                                  Ideas,
fruit within the reach of a hand.
                                                 Fruits: stars.
Burn, gunpowder tree,
                                the adolescent dialog,
sudden scorched skeleton.
                                          12 times
knocked the bronze fist on the high towers.
                                                                  Night
explodes in pieces,
                          it joins them later and itself,
intact, unites.
                     We disperse,
not there in the plaza with its burning trains,
                                                                        here,
over this page:  petrified letters.



                                      3




The young man who walks through this poem,
between Ildefonso and Zocalo,
is the man who writes it:
                                       this page
is also a nocturnal hike.
                                              Here are embodied
spectral friends,
                       the ideas dissipate.
The good, we want the good:
                                              to make right the world.
We are not lacking integrity:
                                              we are lacking humility.
What we want we do not want with innocence.
Precepts and concepts,
                                 pride of theologians:
to beat with the cross,
                                    forged with blood,
to raise a house with small criminal bricks
to decree the obligatory communion.
                                          Some
become secretaries of secretaries
of the Secretary General of Hell.
                                              Rage
turns philosophic,
                        its babble has covered the planet.
Reason descends to earth,
takes the form of the gallows
                                          -- and millions adore it.
Circular entanglement:
                                     we have all been,
in the Great Theater of Filth,
judges, hangmen, victims, witnesses,
                                                     all
have raised false testimony
                                           against others
and against ourselves.
                                      And the most vile: we were
the public who applauded or yawned in its bustasa.
Guilt that knows nothing of guilt,
                                                      innocence,
the worst guilt.
                             Every year was a mountain of bones.

conversations, retractions, excommunications,
reconciliations, apostasies, abjurations,
zig-zag of demonolatry and androlatry
the bewitched and deviations:
my history
                    are histories in error?
History is error.
                           The truth is that,
beyond dates,
                            closer to names,  
history scorns:
                            each day
-- a people’s anonymous beatings,
                                                     unique
beatings --,
                        the unique day
identical to all days.
                                              The truth
is the depth of time without history.
                                               The weight
of the instant that has no weight:
                                                  some rocks with sun,
views already seen that today regress,
rocks of time that are also rocks
under this sun of time,
sun that comes one day without date,
                                                        sun
that illuminates these words,
                                                 sun of words
that extinguish upon naming.
                                                 Suns, words, rocks
burn and extinguish themselves:
                                                  the instance burns them
without burning itself.
                                    Occult, immobile, untouchable,
the present -- not its presences  -- is forever.

Between seeing and doing,
                                     action or contemplation,
I chose the act of words:
                                      form them, inhabit them,
give eyes to language.
                                     Poetry isn’t truth:
it’s the resurrection of presences,
                                                    history
transfigured in the truth of dateless time.
Poetry,
            like history, makes itself;
                                              poetry,
like truth, sees itself.
                                   Poetry:
                                              incarnation
of sun-over-rocks in a name,
                                            dissolution
of the name in a great beyond of rocks.

Poetry, bridge hanging between history and truth,
isn’t a road toward this or that:
                                                    it’s seeing
quietude in movement,
                                       the transit
in quietude.
                   History is the road:
it doesn’t lead to any destination,
                               we all walk it,
truth is walking it.
                                         We don’t come or go;
we are in the hands of time.
                                                  The truth:
to know us,
                  from the origin,
                                            suspended.
Fraternity over the void.
Ideas dissipate,
                          the specters remain:
truth of living and suffering.
An empty taste remains:
                                     time
-- furor shared --
                                     time
-- forgetting shared --
                                     at last transfigured
in memory and its incarnations.
                                                      There remains
time made body distributed :  language.

In the window,
                      warlike simulacrum,    
                                                    ignites and extinguishes
the commercial sky of announcements.
                                                                       Behind,
hardly visible,
                       truthful constellations.
There appears,
                      amongst water towers, antennas, terraced roofs,
liquid column,
                      more mental than corporeal,
waterfall of silence:
                               the moon.
                                              Neither phantasm nor idea:
it was a goddess and is today an errant clarity.
My wife is sleeping.
                               So is the moon,

                                 -- not between reefs of clouds,
between crags and sorrows of dreams:
there is also soul.
                  It flows under her closed eyes,
from her forehead she throws herself down,
                                                            silent torrent,

toward her feet
                    she collapses in herself
and from herself sprouts,
                                             her beatings sculpt her,
invite her to the journey,
                                        copies to invent herself

among the islands of her breasts
                                             is an arm of the sea,
her womb is a lagoon
                                  where the shadow and her vegetation
disappear,
                                                flow about her waist,
raise,
         descend,
                      scatter in her self,
                                                      she ties herself
to her flowing,
                  she disperses in her form:
and in her body.

                                        The truth
is the swelling of a breath
and the visions watched over by closed eyes:
palpable mystery of the person.
Night is at the point of overflowing.
                                             Brighten up.
The horizon has become aquatic.
                                      Throw yourself down
from the height of this hour:
                                        to die
it will be falling or climbing,
                         a sensation or a cessation?
I close my eyes,
                     I hear in my skull
the steps of my blood,
                                   I hear
the passing of time in my temples.
                                           I am still alive.
The room has run aground of the moon.
                                               Wife:
fountain in the night.
                           I fix myself in your flowing peace.


Octavio Paz