Paz, Octavio

English

University of Montana

CutBank Volume 1 Issue 14 CutBank 14 Article 12 Spring 1980 Nocturne of Saint Ildefonso by Betina Escudero Octavio Paz Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cutbank  Part of the Creative Writing Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Paz, Octavio (1980) "Nocturne of Saint Ildefonso by Betina Escudero," CutBank: Vol. 1 : Iss. 14 , Article 12. Available at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cutbank/vol1/iss14/12 This Poetry is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in CutBank by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact scholarworks@mso.umt.edu. Octavio PazNOCTURNE OF SAINT ILDEFONSO1At my window the night inventsanother night,another space:convulsive party in a square meter of blackness.Fleetingcoalitions of fire, nom ad geometries, wandering numbers.From  yellow to green to redthe spiral unwinds.Window!magnetic sheet of calls and responses, high-voltage calligraphy deceiving sky/hell of industry over skin that changes with each instant.Sign-seeds:night fires them,they rise,explode high abovethey precipitate,burned out,in a cone of shadows,reappear,rambling fires,cluster of syllables, spinning conflagration,disperses,once again small bits.The city invents and annuls them.I am at the tunnel’s entrance.These phrases perforate time.18Octavio PazPerhaps I am the one who waits at the tunnel’s end.I speak with closed eyes.On my eyelids,someone has planted a forest of magnetic needles,someone guides the thread of these words.The pagehas become an anthill.Emptiness has settled in the pit of my stomach.I fallthrough this emptiness interminably.I fall without falling.My hands are cold,my feet are cold — but alphabets burn, burn.Spacebecomes and is destroyed.Night insists, instinctively night feels my forehead,my thoughts.W hat does it want?Empty streets, crooked lights.On a street cornerthe specter of a dog.Searches in the trash, for a ghost of a bone.Confused henhouse: yard of a tenement and its commotion.Mexico, toward 1931.Loitering sparrows,a flock of childrenbuilds a nest19Octavio Pazwith newspapers they didn’t sell.The lanterns invent,in desolation make-believe puddles of yellowish light.A pparitions,time exposes:lugubrious, lascivious, heel-clapping: beneath a sky o f  sootthe flam e o f  a skirt.C ’est la m ort— ou la morte . . .Indifferent breeze tears lascerated ads from the walls.At this hourthe red walls of Saint Ildefonso are black and they breathesun become time,time become stonestone become body.These streets were once channels.In the sunhouses were silver:city of lime and upright adobe fallen moon on the lake.The Creoles erected,another city—not white: gold and rose over the blind channels and buried idols idea become space, tangible number.They built itat the eight-direction crossroad,its doorsopen to the invisible:Heaven and hell.D orm ant ward.We travel through galleries of echoes, among broken images:our history.20Octavio PazQuiet nation of stones.Churches,vegetation of domes,their facades petrified gardens of symbols.M iredin the vengeful proliferation of dwarfish houses hum iliated palaces,waterless fountains,disgraced frontages.Congeries insubstantial m adrepore:they accum ulatedon the vast massivity,defeatednot by the weight of the years, but by the disgrace of the present.Square of the Zocalo,vast like a firmam ent:lucid space,court of echoes.There we invent, between Aliocha K. and Julian  S.,destinies of lightningfacing centuries and its coteries.We are draggedby the wind of thought,the verbal wind, wind that plays with m irrors,m aster of reflections,constructor of cities of air,geometriessuspended from  the thread of reason.Gigantic worms:yellow shut-down streetcars.Esses and zees: a crazy car, malicious-eyed insect.21Octavio PazIdeas,fruit at a rm ’s length.Fruit: suns.They burn.Burn, tree of gunpowder,adolescent dialogue, sudden smitten framework.12 timesthe bronze fist of the towers pounds.Nightexplodes into shreds,then gathers them and itself,intact, it unites.We disperse, not there in the plaza with its burnt trains,here,on this page: petrified letters.3The lad who walks through this poem, between San Ildefonso and the Zocalo, is the man who writes:this page also is a nocturnal walk.here specterfriends incarnate,ideas dissipate.Good, we wanted the good:to straighten the world.We d idn’t lack integrity:we lacked humility.We d idn’t want what we wanted with innocence. Precepts and concepts,theologians pride:to strike with the cross,22to found with blood, erect the house with bricks of crime, decree obligatory communion.Some wereconverted into secretaries of the secretaries of the Secretary General of Hell.Rabiesbecame philosophy,its drivel has covered the planet. Reason descended upon earth, took the form of the gibbet—and millions adore it.Circular madness:we have all been, judge, jury, victim, witness in the Grand Theater of Filth,we have allbrought false witnessagainst othersand against ourselves.And the most vile: we were the audience that applauds or yawns in our seat.The guilt that doesn’t know its own guilt,innocence,was the major guilt.Each year a m ount of bones.Conversions, recantations, excommunications, reconciliations, apostasies, abjurations, zig-zag of androlotries and demonolotries, sorcery and deviations: my history,are these histories of error?History is the error.T ru th  is that which,further than dates,closer than names,history scorns:23the uniqueness of each day —anonimous beat of everyone,beatunique in each one—the unrepetitive single day identical to all days.Truthis the bottom  of time without history.Weightof the weightless instanta few stones with sun, vistas seen long ago which return today, stones of time that are of stone also beneath this sun of time, sun that comes from a dateless day,sunthat illuminates these words,sun of words that is extinguished when spoken.They burn and burn outsuns, words, stones:the instant burns them without scorching itself.Hidden, immobile, untouchable, the present— not its presence— is always.Between the act of making and seeing,action or contemplation,I chose the act of words:to make them, inhabit them,to give language eyes.Poetry is not truth: it is the resurrection of presences,historytransfigured into the truth of dateless time.Poetry, like history, is made:poetry,like truth, is seen.Poetry:24incarnation of sun-over-stones in a name,dissolutionof the name in an over-yonder from  the stones. Poetry,hanging bridge between history and truth, not a path tow ard this or that:to seestillness in movement,m otionin stillness.H istory is the path: does not lead anywhere,all travel it, tru th  is to walk through it.We do not come or go: we are in the hands of time.Truth:knowing we are,from  origin,suspended.Brotherhood over the void.4Ideas dissipate,specters remain: tru th  of what has been lived and suffered. An alm ost em pty after-taste remains:time—shared fury—time— shared oblivion—finally transfigured into m emory and its incarnations.Timebecome apportioned-body remains: language.At the windowphantom  warrior,the commercial sky of neonsignites and is quenched.Behind,barely visible,the real constellations.Am ong water tanks, antennas, roofs,the moon:liquid column, more m ental than corporeal, cascade of silence,appears.Neither phantom  nor idea: once goddess and today roving clarity.My wom an sleeps.M oon also,clarity that elapses—not am ong cloud reefs am ong crags and anguishes of dreams: a soul also:It flows beneath her closed eyelids, silent torm ent,precipitates headlong from  her forehead,to her feet,she ravages from  within and she buds from  within,her beats sculpt her, she invents herself with self-surveyance,copies herself while being invented,between the islands of her breastsshe is an arm  of the sea,her belly is the pondwhere shade and its floravanish,she flows through her figure,26rises,descends,scatters within herselfties herselfto her flow,disperses in her figure:also a body.T ru this the surge of waves of a breath  and the visions closed eyes see: palpable mystery of a person.Night is abou t to overflow.It dawns.The horizon has become aquatic.To fling oneselffrom  the height of this hour:will dying befalling or rising,sensation or cessation?I close my eyes,I hear my b lood’s footsteps,inside my skull,I heartime pass through my temple.I am  still alive.The room  is m oon-sanded.W om an:fountain  at night.I entrust myself to her peaceful flow.translated by Betina Escudero27

Nocturne of Saint Ildefonso by Betina Escudero

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Nocturne of Saint Ildefonso by Betina Escudero

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