Steven Godin's Reviews > The Collected Poems, 1957-1987

Preface

SUNSTONE (1957)
DAYS AND OCCASIONS (1958-1961)
HOMAGE AND DESECRATIONS (1960)
SALAMANDER (1958-1961)
SOLO FOR TWO VOICES (1961)
EAST SLOPE (1962-1968)
TOWARD THE BEGINNING (1964-1968)
TOPOEMS (1968)
RETURN (1969-1975)
A DRAFT OF SHADOWS (1974)
AIRBORN (1979)
A TREE WITHIN (1976-1987)

Author's Notes
Paz in English
Index of Titles


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Shadow of the sun sickle sunshadow
casts over my downcast well
unknots the knot mows down desire
unflames this heartsick heart

Yet dismembered memory swims
from the birthspring of nothing
from the wellspring of birth
swims against the current and commands

swims against nothing

****

Everyone's words that each says to himself
I begged that they would always be with me
human reason
the animal with radiant hands
the animal with eyes in its fingertips

The night gathers and expands
a knot of time a cluster of space
I see I hear I breathe
I beg for obedience to this day and night

****

My wife sleeps.
She too is a moon,
a clarity that travels
not between the reefs of the clouds,
but between the rocks and wracks of dreams:
she too is a soul.
She flows below her closed eyes,
a silent torrent
rushing down
from her forehead to her feet,
she tumbles within,
bursts out from within,
her heartbeats sculpt her,
traveling through herself
she invents herself,
inventing herself
she copies it,
she is an arm of the sea
between the islands of her breasts,
her belly a lagoon
where darkness and its foliage
grow pale,
she flows through her shape,
rises,
falls,
scatters in herself,
ties
herself to her flowing,
disperses in her form:
she too is a body.

****

To wait for night I have stretched out
in the shade of a tree of heartbeats.

The tree is a woman and in its leaves
I hear the sea rolling under the day.

I eat its fruits with the taste of time,
fruits of forgetting and fruits of knowledge.

Under the tree they look and touch,
images, ideas and words.

We return through the body to the beginning,
spiral of stillness and motion.

Taste, mortal knowledge, finite pause,
has a beginning and end—and is measureless.

Night comes in and covers us with its tide;
the sea repeats its syllables, now black.

****

Motionless sun,
the enormous space of spread wings;
over the flat stretches of reflections
thirst raises transparent minarets.
You are neither asleep nor awake:
you float in a time without hours.
A breeze barely stirs
the distant lands of mint and fountains.
Let yourself be carried by these words
toward yourself.

****

Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable.
To learn to see.
Your glance scatters seeds.
It planted a tree.
I talk
because you shake its leaves.