OCTAVIO PAZ
"In The Middle Of This Phrase…"

I am not at the crest of the world.
                                                      The moment 
is not the stylite’s pillar,
                                           time
doesn’t rise from my feet,
                                              doesn’t burst
in my skull in a silent black explosion,
illumination the same as blindness.
I am on the sixth floor,
                                          I am
in a cage hung from time.

Sixth floor:
                     clatter and surf,
battle of metals,
                             glasshatter,
engines with a rage now human.
                                                           The night
is a disjointed murmur,
                                            a body
self-embraced, tearing itself apart.
                                                              Blind,
fumbling to bind its pieces,
                                                  it gathers
its broken names and scatters them.
With lopped fingers
the city touches itself in dreams.

I am not at the crossroads:
                                                      to choose
is to go wrong.
                           I am
in the middle of this phrase.
                                                    Where will it take me?
Rumbling tumble,
                                 data and date,
my birthfall:
                       calendar dismembered
in the hollows of my memory.
I am the sack of my shadows.

                                                  Descent
to the slack breasts of my mother.
Wrinkled hills,
                            swabbed lava,
sobbing fields,
                           saltpeter meals.
Two workmen open the pit.
                                                   Crumbled
mouth of cement and brick.
The wracked box appears:
                                                through the loose planks
the pearl-grey hat,
                                  the pair of shoes,
the black suit of a lawyer.
                                               Bones, buttons, rags:
sudden heap of dust
                                     at the feet of the light.
Cold, unused light,
                                   almost sleeping,
dawn light,
                     just down from the hills,
shepherdess of the dead.
                                              That which was my father
fits in that canvas sack
                                         a workman hands me
as my mother crosses herself.
                                                       Before it ends
the vision scatters:
                                   I am in the middle,
hung in a cage,
                             hung in an image.

The beginning drifts off,
                                     the end vanishes.

There is neither start nor finish:
                                                  I am in the pause,

I neither end nor begin,
                                         what I say
has neither hands nor feet.
                                                 I turn around in myself
and always find
                             the same names,
the same faces,
                          and never find myself.

My history is not mine:
                                    a syllable from that broken phrase
the city in its circular fever
                                          repeats and repeats.

City, my city,
                    insulted stela,
dishonored stone,
                                  name spat out.
Your story is History:
                                     fate
masked as freedom,
                                   errant,
orbitless star,
                      a game
we all play without knowing the rules,
a game that no one wins,
                                       a game without rules,
the whim of a speculative god,
                                               a man
turned into a stuttering god.
                                          Our oracles
are aphasic speech.
                                Our prophets
seers with glasses.
                             History:
coming and going
                            without beginning
                                                     without end.
No one has gone there,
                                      no one
has drunk from the fountain,
                                             no one
has opened the stone eyelids of time,
                                                           no one
has heard the first word,
                                      no one will hear the last,
the mouth that speaks it talks to itself,
                                                            no one
has gone down in the pit of the universes,
                                                                   no one
has returned from the dungheap of the suns.
                             History:
dump and rainbow.
                             Scale
to the high terraces:
                             seven notes
dissolved in clarity.
                              Shadowless words.
We didn’t hear them, we denied them.
                                             We said they don’t exist:
we were content with noise.
                                              Sixth floor:
I am in the middle of this phrase:
                                                    where
will it take me?
                        Mangled language.
Poet: gardener of epitaphs.

—Translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger

OCTAVIO PAZ
“Target Practice”

The tide covers, discovers, recovers, and always walks in the nude.

The tide weaves and unweaves, embraces and separates, is never the same and never another.

The tide, sculptor of forms that last as long as their surge.

The tide breaks rocks, polishes conchs.

The tide always assaults itself.

The tide, surge of syllables of the interminable word, without beginning or end, spoken by the moon.

The tide is angry, and on some nights, beating against the rock coast, it ­announces the end of the world.

The tide, transparency crowned with whitecaps that vanish.

The perpetual tide, the unstable tide, the punctual tide.

The tide and its daggers, its swords, its tattered flags, the conquered, the victorious.

The tide, green spittle.

The tide, sleeping on the chest of the sun, dreaming of the moon.

The tide, blue and black, green and purple, dressed in the sun and undressed in the moon, spark of noon and heaving breath of night.

The tide at night, murmur of bare feet on the sand.

The tide, at dawn, opens the eyelids of the day.

The tide breathes in the deep night and, sleeping, speaks in dreams.

The tide that licks the corpses that the coast throws at it.

The tide rises, races, howls, knocks down the door, breaks the furniture, and then, on the shore, softly weeps.

The tide, madwoman writing indecipherable signs on the rocks, signs of death.

The sand guards the secrets of the tide.

Who is the tide talking to, all night long?

The tide is honest, and eventually returns all of its drowned.

Storms come and go, the tide remains.

The tide, hard-working washerwoman of the filth that people leave on the beach.

The tide does not remember where it came from or where it’s going, lost in its coming and going, between itself, among itself.

There, at the cliffs, the tide closes its fist and threatens the earth and sky.

The tide is immortal, its tomb is a cradle.

The tide, chained to its surge.

The melancholy of the tide under the rain in the vagaries of dawn.

The tide knocks down the trees and swallows the town.

The tide, an oily stain spreading with its millions of dead fish.

The tide, its breasts, its belly, its hips, its thighs, beneath the lips and between the arms of the wind in heat.

The spring of sweet water leaps from the rocks and falls into the bitter tide.

The tide, mother of gods and goddess herself, the long nights weeping on the islands of Ionia, the death of Pan.

The tide contaminated with chemical waste, the tide that poisons the planet.

The tide, the living carpet on which the constellations walk on tiptoes.

The tide, lioness whipped into fury by the hurricane, panther tamed by the moon.

The beggar, the nuisance, the bore: the tide.

Lightning splits the chest of the tide, plunges, disappears, and is reborn, turned into a little foam.

The yellow tide, the hired mourner and her flock of laments, the bilious and her wealth in complaints.

The tide: does it walk asleep or awake?

Whispers, laughter, murmurs: the coming and going of the tide in the coral gardens of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, in the cove of Unawatuna.

The tide, horizon that drifts off, hypnotist’s mirror that mesmerizes lovers.

The tide with liquid hands opens the deserted lands populated by the gaze of the contemplative.

The tide lifts these words, rocks them for a moment, and then, with a swipe, erases them.

Translated by Eliot Weinberger