Certainty



If it is real the white light
Of this lamp, real
The hand that writes, are they real
The eyes that watch what is written?

From one word to another
What I say vanishes.
I know that I live
Between two parentheses.

Octavio Paz

                  Here


My steps in this street
Resound
              In another street
Where
          I hear my steps
Passing in this street
Where

Only the mist is real


Octavio Paz

                           The Other



He invented a face.
                             Behind it
He lived, died, and came to life again
Many times.
                    His face
Today has wrinkles in that face.
His wrinkles have no face.

Octavio Paz

                  Small Town



The rocks are time
                             The wind
Centuries of wind
                      The trees are time
People are rock
                       The wind
Folds back on itself and is buried
In the day of rock

There is no water but eyes shine


Octavio Paz

                The Fire of Every Day


As the air
               forms and unforms
over pages of geometry,
over planetary mesas,
its invisible buildings:
                               man.
His language is hardly a grain,
though it burns,
                     in the palm of space.

Syllables are incandescences.
They also are plants:
                                   their roots
construct dwellings of sound.
                                            Syllables
entangle and disentangle,
                                     they play
at similarities and dissimilarities.

Syllables:
               mature in foreheads,
flourish in mouths.
                              Their roots
drink in the night, consume light.
                                        Languages:
incandescent trees
of foliage and rain.

Lightning strike vegetations,
geometries of echos:
over a sheet of paper
the poem forms
                        like the day
over the palm of space.

Octavio Paz

                  I See a Bee Going Around . . .





i see a bee going around this bee no longer exists
little fly with bright red pads as time and again your
      flight beats on
i incline my head lacking proof
i follow a string that marks at least a presence or
      a situation
i listen adorning the silence with incoming waves
that stir up turn over our confused echos as i sing
       in a high voice
stop, shadow of stars in the eyebrow of a man
      out for a walk
who carries on his back a frail golden woman
      mirror of herself
all is lost the weeks are shut in
i look conducting the wind with a secure proposal
like a flower which must scent the air
i open the quiet autumn i visit the sites of shipwrecks
in the depths of the sky birds appear like
       letters
and the dawn makes itself felt like the rind of a fruit
or perhaps you sink your feet somewhere else now
the day is of fire and it shores itself up in colors
the sea full of green clothes its saliva murmurs i am
      the sea
the stirring lured an uneasy crate
my soul is fresh with all my breathing
i suffocate beside antarctic nights
i put on the moon like a hyacinth flower knifewound
      of my sorrowful tear
here i am and this is my life with all my feet resembling each other
i turn a somersault i’m filled with transparent terror
i am alone in an exhibit without windows
without having to make discarded itineraries
i watch the walls fill themselves with snails like the sides
       of a boat,
absorbed deeply, i glue my face to them
following a clock not loving the night i wish it would pass
with snakeskin and lights
garland of the cold my belt twists itself in turn
i am the mare who galloped alone losing pursuit
       of the sad dawn
i accompany in my deafness an unceasing hollow
       trembling
the residents put to bed jump like rubber bands or fish
my wings absorb as a pavilion some forgotten park
and the ports threaten us like abandoned horseshoes
oh it surprises me song of the delirious carp
like a tightrope walker in love or the first fisherman
poor man, who, isolated, shivers like a drop,
a square of time strictly immobile


Pablo Neruda

               Urban Apparition




Did he surge from the earth?
Did he fall from the sky?
He stood among sounds,
wounded,
immobile,
in silence,
buried before the afternoon,
before the inevitable,
his veins attached
to shock,
to asphalt,
with his partings fallen,
with his saintly eyes,
everything, everything naked,
almost blue, of such whiteness.

They spoke of a horse.
I believe it was an angel.


Oliverio Girondo