Now the nights are so brief, their endings take me by surprise. All the things of which I failed to take sufficient notice! Here are the trees again, so lately massed shadow. Here are distinct flowers that were no more than pale flickers of reflected moonlight an hour ago. Here is the everyday lawn, that seemed a brocade robe of darkness and light strewn carelessly on the ground. Everything emerges with the commonplace sky of a summer morning. Screeching crows and jays anticipate the coming of the harsh light, and the moon fades. The owls have gone. Time to close the drapes.
Sunday Verse
Octavio Paz:
ONE AND THE SAME
(Anton Webern, 1883-1945)
Spaces
space
without center no above or below
devours and engenders itself and does not cease
Whirlpool space
and it falls into height
Spaces
clarities cut into jewel-points
hanging
from night's sheerness
black gardens of rock crystal
flowering along a bough of smoke
white gardens that explode in air
Spaces
a sole space that unfolds
flower-face
and dissolves
space into space
All is nowhere
place of impalpable nuptials
-translated by Charles Tomlinson