SAN ILDEFENSO NOCTURNE by Octavio Paz on Mexico City, Mexico

In my window night
invents another night
another space
carnival convulsed
In a square yard of blackness.
Momentary
confederations of fire,
nomadic geometries,
errant numbers.
From yellow to green to red,
the spiral unwinds.
Window:
magnetic plate of calls and answers,
high-voltage calligraphy,
false heaven/hell of industry
on the changing skin of the moment.

Sign-seeds: the night shoots them off,
they rise,
bursting above,
fall
still burning
in a cone of shadow,
reappear.
rambling sparks
syllable clusters,
spinning flames
that scatter;
smithereens once more.
The city invents and erases them.
I am at a the entrance to a tunnel.
Perhaps I am that which waits at the end of the
tunnel.

I speak with eyes closed.
Someone
has planted
a forest of magnetic needles
in my eyelids,
someone
guides the thread of these words.
The page has become an ant's nest.
The void
has settled in the pit of my stomach.
I fall
endlessly through that void.
I fall without falling.
My hands are cold,
my feet cold-
but the alphabets are burning, burning.
Space
makes and unmakes itself.

The night insists,
the night touches my forehead,
touches my thoughts.
What does it want?

2.

Empty streets, squinting lights.
On a corner,
the ghost of a dog
searches the garbage
for a spectral bone.
Uproar in a nearby patio:
cacophonous cockpit.
Mexico, circa 1931.
Loitering sparrows
a flock of children
builds a nest
of unsold newspapers.
In the desolation
the streetlights invent
unreal pools of yellowish light.
Appparitions:
time splits open:
a lugubrious, lascivious clatter of heels,
beneath a sky of soot
the flash of a skirt.
C'est la morte - ou la morte. . . .
The indifferent wind
rips posters fro the walls.
At this hour,
the red walls of Sand Ildefenso
are black and they breathe:
sun turned to time,
time turned to stone,
stone turned to body.

These streets were once canals.
In the sun,
the houses were silver:
city of mortar and stone,
moon fallen in the lake.
Over the filled canals
and the buried idols
the criollos erected
another city
- not white, but red and gold -
idea turned to space, tangible number.
They placed it
at the crossroads of eight directions,
its doors
open to the invisible:
heaven and hell.
Sleeping district.
We walk through galleries of echoes
past brokenimages:
Our history.
Hushed nations of stones.
Churches
dome-growths,
their facades
petrified gardens of symbols.
Shipwrecked
in the spiteful proliferation of dwarf houses:
Humiliated spaces,
fountains without water,
affronted frontispieces.
Cumuli,
over the ponderous bulks,
conquered
not by the weight of the years
but by the infamy of the present.

Zocalo Plaza
vast as the heavens:
diaphanous space,
court of echoes.
There,with Alyosha K and Julien S,
we devised bolts of lightning
against the century and its cliques
The wind of thought
carried us away,
the verbal wind,
the wind that plays with mirrors,
master of reflections,
builder of cities of air,
geometries
hung from the thread of reason.
Shut down for the night,
the yellow trolleys,
giant worms,
S's and Z's
a crazed auto, insect with malicious eyes.
Ideas,
fruit's within an arm's reach,
like stars,
burning.
The girandola is burning,
the adolescent dialogue,
the scorched hasty frame.
The bronze fist
of the tower beats
12 times.
Night
burst into pieces,
gathers them by itself,
and becomes one, intact.
We disperse,
Not there in the plaza with its dead trains,
but here,
on this page petrified letters.

3.

The boy who walks through this poem,
between San Ildefenso and the Zoacalo,
Is the man who writes it:
this page too
in a ramble through the night.
Here the friendly ghosts
become flesh, ideas dissolve.
Good, we wanted good:
to set the world right.
We didn't lack integrity:
we lacked humility.
What we wanted was not innocently wanted.
Precepts and concepts,
the arrogance of theologians,
to beat with a cross,
to institute with blood,
to build the house with bricks of crime,
to declare obligatory communion.
Some
become secretaries to the secretary
to the General Secretary of the Inferno.
Rage
became philosophy,
its drivel has covered the planet,
Reason came down to earth,
took the form of gallows
- and is worshipped by millions.
Circular plot:
to be continued .. . . . . . . .