Proud-pied April: I am a pause

Let’s return to Latin America for today’s addition to National Poetry Month. Like the Chilean Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz was both a poet and a diplomat, in this case in the service of Mexico. He also was a Nobelist, winning for literature in 1990.

I love the moment captured in “Between Going and Staying”. It strikes me as something you’d read in a quantum physics paper: that frozen moment of light, matter and motion that the poet wraps in words. But not one extraneous word. See for yourself:

“Between Going and Staying”

Between going and staying the day wavers,

in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay

where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,

all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,

rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats

the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall

into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,

watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters.

 Motionless,

I stay and go: I am a pause.

In the original:

“Entre irse y quedarse”

Entre irse y quedarse dude el día,
enamorado de su transparencia.

La tarde circular es ya bahía:
en su quieto vaivén se mece el munco.

Todo es visible y todo es elusivo,
todo está cerca y todo es intocable.

Los papeles, el libro, el vaso, el lápiz
reposan a la sombra de sus nombres

Latir del tiempo que en mi sien repite
la misma terca sílaba de sangre.

La luz hace del muro indiferente
un espectral teatro de reflejos.

En el centro de un ojo me descubro;
no me mira, me miro en su mirada.

Se disipa el instante.  Sin moverme,
yo me quedo y me voy: soy una pausa.