4.27.15 "Pause of the blood between now and measureless time."

"Everything threatens us: 
time, that in living fragments severs 
what I have been 
from what I will become, 
as the machete splits the snake; 
awareness, transparency pierced through,
the look blinded by seeing itself looking;
words, grey gloves, mental dust on the grass,
water, skin;
our names, risen up between yourself and me,
walls of emptiness no trumpet can shout down.



Not dream, peopled with broken images, 
nor delirium and its prophetic foam, 
no, nor love with its teeth and claws, are enough. 
Beyond ourselves, 
on the frontier of being and becoming, 
a life more alive claims us

Outside, night breathes, and stretches, 
full of its great warm leaves, 
a war of mirrors: 
fruit, talons, eyes, leafage, 
backs that glisten, 
bodies that make their way through other bodies.

Lie here stretched out on the shore of so much foam, 
of so much life unconscious and surrendered: 
you too belong to the night. 
Lie down, stretch out, you are whiteness and breathing, 
throb, star divided, 
drink and glass,
bread that weighs down the scales on the side of daybreak

Pause of the blood between now and measureless time." 

Octavio Paz