I need to start this off by saying, that I am my own biggest critic. Whenever I notice something wrong with anything that I have created I try to make an immeadiate change to it, but for the sanctity of this quasi art-form I have here I will keep it the same, but I must not the inaccurecy that occurred in a previous post. I made mention of Neruda (and honestly no one probably noticed the error but as the quasi perfectionist that I am, I must make right what was wrong), but as of tonight I realized that the actual poet I was thinking of was Octavio Paz. Now this is a minor change, not saying Paz and Neruda are interchangable but to say that the meaning of the original post is not much different to the general audience now that I make this point. The main reason why I am making this change is due to a painting that I created tonight. After finishing the painting, I realized it reminded me of the "Neruda" (which was actually an Octavio Paz poem) that I mentioned in a previous post. Well here it is, the poem that is, in its entirety, I hope you enjoy.
Head by the soul, footsteps
in the mind more than shadows,
shadows of thought more than footsteps
through the path of echoes
that memory invents and erases:
without walking they walk
over this present, bridge
slung from one letter to the next.
Like drizzle on embers,
footsteps within me step
toward places that turn to ait.
Names: they vanish
in a pause between two words.
The sun walks through the rubble
of what I'm saying; the sun
razes the places as they sawn,
hesitantly, on this page;
the sun opens my forehead,
balcony
perched within me.
I drift away from myself,
following this meandering phrase,
this path of rocks and goats.
Words glitter in the shadows,
and the black tide of syllables
covers the page, sinking
its ink roots
in the subsoil of language.
From my forehead I set out
toward a noon the size of time.
A banyan's centuries of assault
on the vertical patience of a wall
last less than this brief
bifurication of thought:
the seen and the foreseen.
Neither here not there;
through that frontier of doubt,
crossed only by glimmers and mirages,
where language recants, I travel toward myself.
The hour is a crystal ball.
I enter an abandoned patio:
apparition of an ash tree.
Green exclamations,
wind in the branches.
On the other side, the void.
Inconclusive patio threatened
by writing and its uncertainties.
I walk among the images
of an eye that has lost its memory.
I am one of its images.
The ash tree, sinuous liquid flame,
is a murmur rising
till it becomes a speaking tower.
garden turned to scrub:
its fever invents creatures
the mythologies later copy.
Adobe, lime and time:
the dark walls that are and are not.
Infinitesimal wondrs in their cracks:
the phantom mushroom, vegetable Mithridates,
the newt and its fiery breath.
I am inside the eye : the well where,
from the beginning, a boy is falling,
the well where I recount the time
spent falling from the beginning,
the well of the account of my account,
where the water rise
and my shadow falls.
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