“Obsidian Butterfly” by Octavio Paz (translated by Eliot Weinberger)
They killed my brothers, my children, my uncles. On the banks of Lake Texcoco I began to weep. Whirlwinds of salt-peter rose from Peñon hill, gently picked me up, and left me in the courtyard of the Cathedral. I made myself so small and gray that many mistook me for a pile of dust. Yes I, mother of flint and star, bearer of the ray, am now but a blue feather that a bird loses in the brambles. Once, I would dance, my breasts high and turning, turning, turning until I became still, and then I would sprout leaves, flowers, fruit. The eagle throbbed in my belly. I was the mountain that creates you as it dreams, the house of fire, the primordial pot where man is cooked and becomes man. In the night of the decapitated words my sister and I, hand in hand, leapt and sang around the I, the only standing tower in the razed alphabet. I still remember my songs:
Light, headless light
Golden-throated light
Sings in the thicket green
They told us: the straight path never leads to winter. And now my hands tremble, the words are caught in my throat. Give me a chair and a little sun.
In other times, every hour was born from the vapor of my breath, danced a while on the point of my dagger, and disappeared through the shining door of my hand mirror. I was the tattooed noon and naked midnight, the little jade insect that sings in the grass at dawn, and the clay nightingale that summons the dead. I bathed in the sun’s waterfall, I bathed in myself, soaked in my own splendor. I was the flint that rips the storm clouds of night and opens the doors of the showers. I planted gardens of fire, gardens of blood, in the Southern sky. Its coral branches still graze the foreheads of lovers. There, love is the meeting of two meteors in the middle of space, and not this obstinacy of rocks rubbing each other to ignite a sparking kiss.
Each night is an eyelid the thorns never stop piercing. And the day never ends, never stops counting itself, broken into copper coins. I am tired of so many stone beads scattered in the dust. I am tired of this unfinished solitaire. Lucky the mother scorpion who devours her young. Lucky the spider. Lucky the snake that sheds its skin. Lucky the water that drinks itself. When will these images stop devouring me? When will I stop falling in those empty eyes?
I am alone and fallen, grain of corn pulled from the ear of time. Sow me among the battle dead. I will be born in the captain’s eye. Rain down on me, give me sun. My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped. Wait for me on the other side of the year: you will meet me like a lightning flash stretched to the edge of autumn. Touch my grass breasts. Kiss my belly, sacrificial stone. In my navel the whirlwind grows calm: I am the fixed center that moves the dance. Burn, fall into me: I am the pit of living lime that cures the bones of their afflictions. Die in my lips. Rise from my eyes. Images gush from my body: drink in these waters and remember what you forgot at birth. I am the wound that does not heal, the small solar stone: if you strike me, the world will go up in flames.
Take my necklace of tears. I wait for you on this side of time where light has inaugurated a joyous reign: the covenant of the enemy twins, water, that escapes between our fingers, and ice, petrified like a king in his pride. There you will open my body to read the inscription of your fate.
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