Reading Octavio Paz
Midnight
between
Mexico City and the highlands
the night
spun
into deep velvet
air so dense I couldn’t understand
how we could pass,
along the way the fabric
punctured
by lorries of soldiers
dead set
in armor, ceremonial guns bristling
obsidian swords
helmeted, alert
laid by in rest areas. We were
afraid
to take our ease
for seven hours.
We had the windows rolled
down, thick tropical air flowing
in, a weave reaching back
or down
or covering or connecting
so that I could hear us,
ourselves, talking quietly
in the car as it traveled
its curving line along
the highway past
lakes dying of lilies,
of human
interference
into the lop-topped mountains
murmuring with
our words of today,
English and Spanish,
the driver trying to teach me
while trying to learn, each of
us folding into the other’s
head some small
distance.
Talking of soldiers, pitched
against la violencia, still no
stopping for the rest room,
in Mexico
for centuries
no rest,
only un-,
as well as any narco, they
could raid an americana,
blame it on a driver.
The night
so dark, so velvet,
so thick with oxygen
exhaled from plants.
It let us through. The soldiers
couldn’t see us,
I thought,
I thought maybe we weren’t
on the same highway as
the soldiers.
Do you hear
that?
The driver, surprised:
It happens sometimes,
not often.
Cascade of voices, riding the
fabric, this magic
carpet, flow of
syllables,
history of words,
languages.
As if we were
driving not through black
and empty
night but past
markets and carnivals, busy
populations.
On one curve
louder, another
silenced.
Reaching el Lago del
Patzcuaro where the lake,
still huge, though
a fragment
of itself in the
time of empire,
still fights
its lilies to live, where
the old temple hulks
beneath the cathedral,
beneath
the entire town—
where the empire never buckled
to the Aztec,
so the bloodlines,
the lines of blood
straighten.
One day a horseman rode past
in the town, English-erect
in the Spanish
saddle.
To see is not
to regard.
To be seen is not
to be regarded.
The horse’s fine
fetlocks, its hooves clicking
upon agonizing cobbles.
Riding it
was something ancient,
something old something cold
Do not tell me not to judge.
What happened here,
in Mexico, was
never anything good.
What if one day we said:
Only the Germans may
speak about or judge the
Nazis?
Turks, a fine people,
too bad
about the Armenians, Kurds.
The Americans, what is it
with the Americans, fucking
the whole world.
You, Octavio, stand on your
ancient balconies
pondering syllables
incomprehensible
as crows spreading into
night.
Inside
the hollow
Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon
statue on its island,
paintings illuminate so many
lost words.
A hollow man, a hollow man, standing in a
dying lake, soon to be a desert like the plain
A hollow man erect on this island
in this gasping lake, this island
with its top flattened, lopped,
like the pyramids whose prayers are lost,
because the gods are lost, this island
with its top leveled like the mountains
surrounding.
The first turning of the stairs,
blood from the first rulers
remembered, Tzintzuntzan:
whips, slaves,
second turning of the stairs,
whips, blood, horses:
the Conquest,
turning,
Revolution: horses,
blood, guns,
turning, Federales: jeeps,
guns
turning, SUVs, guns,
blood: la Familia.
Now that
you stand in the hollow man’s fist, upraised,
look out over the lake:
one day in time
fires flared from ruins that were not
ruins, drums boomed across the
water, and then
we cannot be sure what happened.
The murals are a memory. Slaves,
blood. St. Gertrudes martyred
in the plaza, blood gushing from her breast,
merry fat babies
lapping
at the fount.
Oh Mexico you drink
as you did before, do not
tell me not to judge.
At the top a hipster—glasses, sideburns—
sprints to catch. You are from America! I
lived in America for two years. Denver,
so beautiful.
Many
try their English, they
speak our language, descending
that spiral staircase.
Cortez’s palace,
zocalo, Cuidad de Mexico,
guide to Americans:
See Diego Rivera’s Christ,
feel, he says, the Mixteca confusion,
why worship
a god in so much pain?
And why, I say to my son,
the Templo Major
a few feet away,
layers of burnt
altars for burnt hearts, built by
ruler upon ruler,
the people not the gods
in their agonies.
It is hard, said a young man.
On a bus. I didn’t write down
exactly what he said.
Something like. We would say
life is hard, but he said in this
life it is hard to get any power.
He was twenty-five, he spoke
English well, he had been to America.
For two years, that is what
they all said, two years in America.
He said come to my house, listen
to my reggae music, when I play
I feel a little power. Had it not been
for the tourist advisories, la violencia,
telling us he was a barbarian,
we would have gone, learned much
more than we did. It is so hard
to get any power.
In this life.
I was on the bus with him in Patzcuaro
with the lilies strangling the lake,
Chinese sucking livelihoods from reed weavers,
stealing designs from pottery makers
copper workers, wood
artisans and luthiers,
those workshops going back
to the days of empire,
so that now Michoacan
exports its people.
He told this to me, I want to tell
you what he said.
While he spoke I
thought of my baby
choking to death,
drowning
in his own blood.
There was nothing—
In this life,
it is so hard to get any
power.
One day my son
stood atop a staircase
overlooking the lands of lost
Tzintzuntzan, assuming
it is lost
(Paz: “lost islands” in
the evaporated
Lake of Mexico,
I thought, reading, my lost places,
Lyonesse, Avalon,
are on another continent
and not mine)
assuming Tzintzuntzan
is lost, I don’t
know, I’d have to ask,
I do not know
the right people to ask:
was it ever
lost? The lake, the islands, cities,
the flat-topped mountains.
Inside the cathedral, glyphs,
meaning what, speak to
the congregation. Does it
hear?
Who placed
those blocks, gathered from
the old temples, in which
configurations, decided to
turn them in which
directions, was it
a decision that certain
glyphs face those who pray
to the new god?
My son’s hair long, thick, wavy
with moisture, he looks
happy in rich air high altitude
yet thick with planted oxygen.
Later in Mexico City in the palace
courtyard there he is his hair
contemporary with 16th century
architecture, looking young as he was
charismatic as he was, people stopping
as they did to point: da Vinci! In the
olive groves where bearded, long-
haired Jesus lay encased in glass,
nuns stared, no doubt the hair
also that gliding, water-sliding
way of striding, with some concern.
Now, he is emptied for
the moment, pale, hunched. I know
why, hate to think of it, lost
in cities of his own country, when
he seemed so at home in Mexico, amid
the interstices of the centuries.
It is hard, said the young man,
in Patzcuaro. Define hard, I do
not know how you define it. It
seemed, that moment on the bus,
we were all on the same bus.
I do not
know what my son was thinking,
that moment, on that bus,
but I could see he was
thinking.
Is a man—Paz—brown-skinned, and
traveling in a brown-skinned land
more empowered to be wrong
than a woman, white and traveling
in a brown-skinned land?
Obsessing with how lover
and beloved
merge.
I am not concerned with that.
The ruins sweating,
cowering, lurking, waiting. It is said
of them. Sweating and waiting. Who
knows how many still buried? We don’t know.
Archaeologists don’t know.
Experts are unsure.
Surely someone knows.
Ask enough someones.
In the village
of Coba. Seven centuries of triumph
over that hideous city. Someone knows
what it lives beside.
Seven hundred years
a village. My village in New
England three hundred years alive.
Still there, hating, guarding.
I believe
it takes a village. It takes a child. It
is grueling, a small village. You build
a village, or you build Coba.
Priests,
pyramids, sacrifice, or the village
square for seven hundred years,
it is the same. It is either/or.
Atop the pyramid
in the shrine rooms, an atmosphere,
it is the same all over Mexico, an
altitude, even in the lowlands.
If you did not know what went on
here you would know
what went on here. No human
sacrifice here,
they—who?—say.
Yet no other rooms so black
and bleak. Open to the sun, yet dark
and black. Have you ears to
hear them here, those voices,
weeping with pain and
pride.
The village thought primitive,
the lost knowledge,
bold monuments,
bemoaned. Yet the people live,
as they chose,
seven hundred years
ago. Before the Spanish.
Not lost, this city: turned
from.
To be direct I want to know
what’s inside or under, mainly inside,
those mountains
around el Lago del Patzcuaro.
No one knows, I’m told.
I’m told they haven’t excavated. Surely
someone knows.
Just this year village dwellers
came to archaeologists, revealed
a cave of Maya artifacts. See?
Someone
knew. So much
we don’t.
I care nothing for artifacts. Only want to know
which came first
mountain
or pyramid
pyramid or mountain
Did they cut off the tops of those mountains
to match their pyramids? That would be
monumental architecture. Terrifying even
to the Aztec.
And now Michoacan
exports its people.
It is so hard
to get any power.
It always
has been