Friday, February 22, 2008

OCTAVIO PAZ ON MEXICO CITY, MEXICO.


truth of lived and suffered.
An almost empty taste remains;
shared fury
time
shared oblivion-:
in the end transfigured
in memory and its incarnations.
What remains is
time as portioned body: language.
In the window, travesties of battle:
the commercial sky of advertisments
flares up, goes out.
Behind, barely visible,
the true constellations.
Among the waters, antennas, rooftops,
a liquid column,
more mental than corporeal,
a waterfall of silence:
the moon.
Neither phantom nor 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,
a silent torrent
rushing down
from her forehead to her feet,
she tumbles within.
bursts out from within,
her heartbeats sculpt her,
travelling 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 pale,
she flows through her shape,
rises, falls,
scatters in herself, ties
herself to her flowing,
disperses in her form:
she too is a body.
Truth
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.
It growslight.
The horizon has become aquatic
To rush down
from the heights of this hour:
will dying
be a falling or a rising,
a sensation or a cessation?
Iclose my eyes,
I hear in my skull
the footsteps of my blood,
time pass through my temples.
I am still alive.
The room is covered with woman.
Woman;
fountain in the night.
I am bound to her quiet flowing.

**** ********** *****

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