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Illustrated
excerpts from the poem
"Sun Stone"
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The "Sun Stone" represents the "Wheel of Time",
the stone calendar of the Aztecs.Considered as the greatest poem of Octavio PAZ, it makes us cross
successively all states
of the soul: lyrical and erotic, it expresses the deep loneliness of man which can be
transcended only through attempts at
communion, sexual love,compassion and faith. |
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Willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances, turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout, arriving forever: the calm course of a star
or the spring, appearing without urgency. |
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Water behind a stillness of closed eyelids flowing all night and pouring out prophecies,
a single presence in the procession of waves wave over wave until all is overlapped,
in a green sovereignty without decline
a bright hallucination of many wings
when they all open at the height of the sky.
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An actual presence like a burst of singing,
like the song of the wind
in a burning building,
a long look holding the whole world suspended, the world with all its seas
and all its mountains. |
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Body of light as
it is filtered through agate,
the thighs of light, the belly of light, the bays,
the solar rock and the cloud-colored body,
color of day that goes racing and leaping,
the hour glitters and assumes its body,
now the world stands,visible through your body, and is transparent through your
transparency. |
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I go a journey in galleries of sound,
I flow among the resonant presences going, a blind man passing transparencies,
one mirror cancels me, I rise from another, forest whose trees are the pillars of magic,
under the arches of light I go among
the corridors of a dissolving autumn. |
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I go among your body as among the world,
your belly the sunlit center of the city,
your breasts two churches where are celebrated the great parallel mysteries of the blood,
he looks of my eyes cover you like ivy,
you are a city by the sea assaulted,
you are a rampart by the light divided
into two halves, distinct, color of peaches,
and you are saltiness, you are rocks and birds beneath the edict of concentrated noon
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And dressed in
the coloring of my desires
you go as naked as my thoughts go naked,
I go among your eyes as I swim water,
I go upon your forehead as on the moon,
like cloud I go among your imagining
journey your belly as I journey your dream. |
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Your loins are crystal and your loins are water, your lips,
our hair, they all night shower down like rain, and all day long you open up my breast
with your fingers
of water, you close my eyelids with your mouth of water, raining upon my bones,
and in my breast the roots of water
drive deep a liquid tree. |
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I travel through your waist as through a river,
I voyage your body as through a grove going,
as by a footpath going up a mountain
and suddenly coming upon a steep ravine .
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I go the straitened way of your keen thoughts break through to daylight
upon your white forehead
and there my spirit flings itself down,
is shattered now
I collect my fragments one by one
and go on, bodiless,
searching, in the dark....
I search without finding,
and I write alone.
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No one is here,
and the day ends,
the year ends,
I have gone down with the moment,
all the way down,
The road is invisible over all these mirrors,
They repeat and reflect forever
my broken image.
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Writing of fire on
the slab of jade,
the writing of the wind upon the desert, testament of the sun,
pomegranate, wheat-ear.
The years of fantasy and circular days
That open upon the same street,
the same wall. |
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A face of flames,
face that is eaten away,
the adolescent and persecuted face
the moment flares up and they are all one face,
the procession of faces of this calling,
all of these names are unified in one name,
all these faces are now a single face.
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Facing an afternoon, stone and saltpeter,
an enormous fleet of invisible razors,
you write a red and indecipherable
writing upon my skin and these open wounds
cover my body, a burning suit of flame.
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I burn and am not consumed,
I long for water,
and in your eyes there is no water,
but stone,
your breasts are stone, your belly is stone, your loins are made of stone,
your mouth has the taste of dust,
your mouth tastes to me
of an evenomed time,
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Your body has the taste of a
pit
without any exit
now there is nothing in me
but one vast wound,
a gap with no possible way of healing.
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The mad and decaying masks they are used to separate us, man from man,
and man from his own self
they are thrown down
for an enormous instant
and we see darkly our own lost unity,
how vulnerable it is to be women and men,
the glory it is to be man
and share our bread
and share our sun and our death,
the dark forgotten marvel of being alive.
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To love is to struggle, and if two people kiss
the world is transformed,
and all desires made flesh
and intellect is made flesh;
great wings put forth their shoots
from the shoulders of the slave,
the world is real and to be touched
and the wine is wine, the bread can taste again, the water is water.
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To love is to struggle,
is to open the doors,
to stop being a fantasy with a number
condemned to the sentence of the endless chain
by a faceless master;
and the world is changed
when two people look at each other,
recognizing.
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