Song of a Reformed Headhunter

stars of the devil lightning at rest i.m. Octavio Paz

Progress porque la luz canta con un rumor de agua, con un rumor de follaje canta el agua —Octavio Paz, “El cántaro roto” Not more light for dangerous streets but more light for staircases of the soul. Not more leaves for shade from the sun but more leaves for the sake of leaves. Not more water for botanical gardens but more water for broken water jars. We do not say it is not progress to have safe streets, sunshade and gardens. We do not say it is not progress to have hospitals, gas stations and stock markets. We do not say it is not progress to pipe clean water to every thirsty home. But the soul keeps to streets paved with light and fears to climb dark staircases. But the leaves hold out the blistering sun and do not hold the lightest look. But the broken water jars are unearthed, labeled and displayed after gardens die. So let the soul climb dizzy staircases even when lying down in a hospital. So let the leaves flex in their vigor the sun’s large energies at a gas station. S...

Hard Fire duro fulgor resuelto ya en cristal y claridad pacífica —Octavio Paz, “El río” I burn my body up. or rather it burns me, not for a greasy plate but brilliant clarity. Not eye nor stub of toe, not even strand of hair, in lighting up the night my furious heart will spare. Not smoke nor flickering but an unearthly blue will pierce the veil of sky when burning me is through. *

Cinema Allá del otro lado, se extienden las playas inmensas como una mirada de amor —Octavio Paz, “¿No hay salida?”             We may pilot a refitted three-masted collier or a state-of-the art starship, it does not matter which, when we have sailed too long at sea or in space, the mission, to find breadfruit or survivors, shriveled to a hard monotony. When land swings into sight, as it eventually does, in glorious Metrocolor, the shore bristling with a thousand spears closely packed as a wheat field, how can it not bear the look of love as well, a planet like Earth, but better? There will, of course, be a father, a powerful king or a brilliant professor, who raised love to perfection and shielded her from pricks of knowledge. He will have a servant, a robot capable of producing silk dresses overnight or a translator trusted by the island and wise in the ways of the intruders. The natives are expendable. They can line up to hold a...

I hate list-poems and so I had to write one. The Man Who Looks for Prophecy el que pedío su cuerpo, el que su sombra, el que huye de sí y el que se busca —Octavio Paz, “Máscaras del alba” The man who looks for prophecy in the bones of dead birds The man who reads the nightly news with a crooked smile The man who carries his daughter three days to a hospital tent The man who leaves the sleeping woman to clean his rifle The man who digs in his yard and hears his spade ring out The man who thinks of the bad crop as he turns over the ground The man who weeps quietly in his cell but not for his crime The man who writes long novels and burns them for heating The man who strides across the piazza just before day breaks The man who waits on the train platform for what he does not know The man who works in the library and jerks off in the stacks The man who plies his ferry at the waist of the black river The man who pans the river banks for gold deposits The man who loses his salary at the...

The Mountain palabras que son flores que son frutos que son actos. —Octavio Paz, “Himno entre ruinas” The mountain is too small to be a mountain but the legend of a lovelorn princess who hanged herself and drops from the trees like a fruit, slows down the childish walk up to the top, if childish heart dares leave the school’s wire gate. The mountain in the school is friendlier. One grade climbs naturally to the next, affords a higher ledge on which to view the world prostrate beneath the childish feet, the word a flower becoming a fruit the act. The deception of flowers! The lie of fruit! What is full of life is also full of death. The word refuses to live with the act. The school, and its wire gate, lies in ruins. The mountain flowers still, shading the sun. *

Bougainvillea Por un instante están los nombres habitados —Octavio Paz, “Semilla para un himno” When the island is starved for a hymn, this land of bougainvillea, illegible graves, and car dealerships, where eating has usurped the offices of sex, where sun is oppressively silent and rain everywhere gossips, as the ear remembers one musical phrase, we clutch our name, given by a long dead mother, harnessed by a hardworking father, and agonize over eating our name or planting it in the soil. We look over the wall to see what our neighbors do. Their garden is smooth like a piece of paper. They look as hungry as yesterday. When they ask us pleasantly, “Have you eaten yet?” they sound obscene. Shall we eat it? We are so hungry. It will recall the satisfactions of lying with a woman or a man. No! We must plant it. But what if our name has grown too old to grow? The bougainvillea puts out pink and purple flowers, paper-thin. The graves settle back with defeat. The cars exchange hands li...

No Dancer A la española el día entra pisando fuerte —Octavio Paz, “Untitled” We have no dancer to match the Spanish dancer. We have no sport like the gold-plaid ceremony of bullfighting. Day stumbles across the boards, a young ballerina, loses her voice, the old wayang singer, for no one hears her sing. The Emperor orders, “We will have singing and dancing,” and singers warble his strain and dancers fall over his feet. We snigger aloud at different volumes in different places. We know we have no dancer to match the Spanish heat. Day bends over hot factories and cold shopping malls but all the water has been treated by treatment plants, even the water in the river, by the Emperor’s order, gargles in a cement throat and into the ocean rants. So we watch in horrid fascination when one of us cuts her throat in slow and fierce movement, to an order implicit in the day the ball of her hand rises and falls, to a voice that beckons from the center and the border she sings back with...

From Octavio Paz's "Poetry and Modernity," translated by Eliot Weinberger, The Tanner Lecture on Human Values, delivered at the University of Utah, 1989: For the ancients the past was the golden age, the natural Eden that we lost one day; for the moderns, the future was the chosen place, the promised land. But it is the present that has always been the time of poets and lovers, Epicureans and certain mystics. The instant is the time of pleasure but also the time of death, the time of the senses and that of the revelation of the beyond. I believe that the new star — that which has yet to appear on the historical horizon but which has already been foretold in many indirect ways — will be the star of the present, the star of now. Men and women will soon have to construct a morality, a politics, an erotics, and a poetics of present time. This change toward the present naturally involves the body, but it need not and should not be confused with the mechanical and promiscuous ...