It is not the wind
not the steps of the water sleepwalking
past the petrified houses and the trees
far from the reddish night
it is not the sea climbing the stairs
Everything is still
the natural world is at rest
It is the city turning on its shadow
searching always searching itself
lost in its immensity
never catching up
never able to leave itself
I close my eyes and watch the cars go by
they flare up and burn out and flare up
burn out
I don't know where they’re going
All of us going to die
What else do we know?
On a bench an old man talks to himself
To whom do we talk talking to ourselves?
He’s forgotten his past
he will not reach the future
He doesn’t know who he is
alive in the middle of the night
talking to hear himself
A couple embraces by an iron railing
she laughs and asks something
her question floats up and opens in the heights
At this hour there’s not a wrinkle in the sky
three leaves fall from a tree
someone whistles on the corner
a window lights in the house across the way
How strange to know yourself as alive!
To walk among people
with the open secret of being alive
Dawns with no one in the Zócalo
only our delirium
and the streetcars
Tacuba Tacubaya Xochimilco San Angel Coyoacán
in the plaza bigger than night
lit
ready to take us
through the vastness of the hour
to the end of the world
Black rays
trolley-poles erect
against a sky of stone
their tuft of sparks small tongues of fire
ember that punctures the night
bird
flying whistling flying
among the tangled shadows of ash trees
in a double line from San Pedro to Mixcoac
Green-black vault
mass of humid silence
in flames above our heads
while we talk in shouts
on the straggling streetcars
that cross the suburbs
with the crash of towers crumbling
If I am alive I still walk
those same pitted streets
muddy puddles from June to September
entranceways high mud walls gardens sleeping
watched only by
white purple white
the smell of the flowers
the impalpable clusters of grapes
In the darkness
a streetlight almost alive
by a stark wall
A dog cries
questions to the night
There’s no one
the wind has come into the grove
Clouds clouds gestation and ruin and more clouds
fallen temples new dynasties
reefs and disasters in the sky
Sea above
high plains clouds
Where is the other sea?
Mistresses of eyes
clouds
architects of silence
And suddenly for no reason
the word would appear
alabaster
thin unsummoned transparency
You said
I will make music with her
castles of syllables
You made nothing
Alabaster
without flower or scent
stalk without blood or sap
cut whiteness
throat just a throat
song with no feet no head
Today I am alive and without nostalgia
the night flows
the city flows
I write on this page that flows
I shuttle with these shuttling words
The world did not begin with me
it will not end with me
I am
one pulsebeat in the throbbing river
Twenty years ago Vasconcelos told me
“Devote yourself to philosophy
It won’t give us life
but it is a defense against death”
And Ortega y Gasset
in a bar on the Ródano
“Learn German
and apply yourself to thinking
Forget the rest”
I do not write to kill time
nor to revive it
I write that I may live and be revived
This afternoon from a bridge I saw
the sun enter the waters of the river
All was in flames
the statues the house the porticoes burned
In the gardens feminine clusters of grapes
ingots of liquid light
the coolness of solar vessels
The poplar a foliage of sparks
the water horizontal unmoving
beneath the flaming earths and skies
Each drop of water
a fixed eye
the weight of enormous beauty
on each open eye
Reality suspended
on the stalk of time
beauty weighs nothing
Peaceful reflection
time and beauty are the same
light and water
Gaze that sustains the loveliness
time enchanted in a gaze
world weightless
if man has weights
Is not beauty enough?
I know nothing
l know what is too much
not what is enough
Ignorance is as difficult as beauty
some day I will know less and open my eyes
Perhaps time doesn’t pass
images of time pass
and if the hours do not come back presences come back
There is another life within this life
that fig tree will come back tonight
other nights return tonight
As I write I hear the river go by
not this
that which is this
The back and forth of moments and visions
blackbird on a grey stone
in the clarity of March
black
center of clarities
Not the marvelous presented
but the present sensed
the presence with nothing more
nothing more full and abundant
It is not memory
nothing thought nor desired
Not the same hours
others
are always others and are the same
they enter and expel us from ourselves
they see with our eyes what eyes do not see
There is another time within time
still
with no hours no weight no shadow
without past or future
only alive
like the old man on the bench
indivisible identical perpetual
We never see it
Transparency