SAN ILDEFENSO NOCTURNE by Octavia Paz on Mexico City, Mexico


Circular plot:
we have all been,
in the Grand Theater of Filfth,
judge, executioner, victim, witness,
we have all
given false testimony
against the others
and against ourselves,
And the most vile: we
were the public that applauded or yawned in its seats.
The guilt that knows no guilt,
innocence
was the greatest guilt.
Each year was a mountain of bones.
Conversions, retractions, excommunications,
reconciliations, apostasies, recantations,
the zigzag of the demonaltries and androlatries
bewitchments and aberrations
mt history
Are they the histories of an error?
history is the error.
Beyond dates,
before names,
truth is that
which history scorns:
the everyday
-everyone's anonymous heartbeat,
the unique
beat of every one-
the unrepeatable
everyday, identical to all days.
Truth
is the base of a time without history.
The weight
of the weightless moment:
a few stones in the sun

seen long ago,
today return,
stones of time that are also stone
beneath this sun of time,
sun that comes from a dateless day,
sun
that lights up these words,
sun of words
that burns out when they are named.
Suns, words. stones ,
burn and burn out:
the moment burns them
without burning,
hidden, unmoving, untouchable,
the present-not its presences-is always.
Between seeing and making,
contemplation or action,
I chose the act of words:
to make them, inhabit them,
to give eyes to the language.
Poetry is not truth:
it is the ressurection of presences,
history
transfigured in the truth of undated time.
Poetry,
like history, is made;
poetry,
suspension bridge between history and truth,
is not a path toward this or that:
it is to see

the stillness in motion,
change
in stillness
History is the path:
it goes nowhere,
we all walk it,
truth is to walk it.
We neither go nor come:
we are in the hands of time.
Truth:
to know ourselves,
from the beginning,
hung.
Brotherhood over the void.
Ideas scatter,
the ghosts remain to be continued. . . . . .