READING  PAZ

Between poem and poem
there is no kind of breathing,
no sculpture of space to lean from
and wait for requitals.
I don't speak of the city
but the stones that outlive it.
I don't speak of the name
but the woman whose name alone I forget,
in forgetting whose name
I have forgotten all of myself
but my name.
Watching in a darkening room,
the seas fight their old wars
of water and colour on the steps
of the old spinning earth,
somebody began me and I walk continents
searching for the meaning of my face.
From the blood on the mountains
and the glass on the street,
is the blood of my fingers
and the glass on the street,
and I am a part,
yet I am apart
for this horizon of weakening light
that watches me.
Tonight I am a street,
sick with incessant clatter of feet
yet searching, searching
for the moon's slant of white,
the composition of darkness and light
that will deliver truth
in the hands of the poet.
I write a line and it looks back
with its own black life.
I was born in my sleep I tell it,
on a date of the alphabet I awoke,
I am not separate from the thrill of pain
that closes my youth with a dead flower.
I am the child of my illnesses
whimpering on the lost plains of age.
I sleep in the pit of the enigmatic night,
surrounded by windows that
multiply my body and imprison my dreams,
entombed in a body of dreams,
I neither body nor dream,
only human as a wind
trapped in the thin red rocks of history,
I fight the strata of dead men
who have contributed their mortality to mine.
 

IN MY MOTHER'S CLOTHES

I walk in my mother's clothes on the street,
feel the cool sweat under my arms soak her blouse
timidly: shy, damp flowers of my sweat on her blouse.
I let the white dust with its years of spit and sweet
wrapper, its agonising lifelessness, pass over me
in my mother's clothes, her rust and bright blue
and burnt orange, my mother's colours on my skin
in the dust, as if they belonged to me. I cheat people:
men, girls in high heels who pretend not to look
and fidget and sulk, girls lovely and empty with want
who I destroy with my Look of Elsewhere.
It's so easy to break girls, spoil their carefully planned
afternoons, their elaborate ploys to sweeten the air,
tantalise. Their eyes are bright with their love
for themselves, while I walk on the street
in my mother's clothes, laughing inside, relieved
of the burden of being what one wears, since in my
mother's clothes, laughing inside, relieved
of the burden of being what one wears, since in my
mother's clothes I am neither myself nor my mother.
In her inky silks, her cool green gardens of chiffon
that once filled me with thirst, I dream of elusiveness
(which is actually the dream of all girls in high heels
on the street, who I scorn!) Is it only one woman we all
want to be? The woman opens her eyes and looks
at the mirror into the eyes of a child. The child who drifts
like a shadow through long summer afternoons when
everyone sleeps, the spindly creature of six who slips
onto her fingers her mother's gold rings, pulls on 
an old cardigan that smells of sunlight and milk,
and conducts herself, drowsy with love, through rooms
with their curtains drawn against the honeyed light of June.
Does she always begin like this—seeking love by trying 
to become the person whose love she seeks? Rolling up
the sleeves of her mother's cardigan and sitting with legs
dangling from a high chair, her frail little shoulders stiff
with pride, her sisters jealous. Her mother slowly waking
to the calm evening light, laughing at the serious girl-clown
who is opening her eyes to look at the mirror into the eyes
of a woman, when all that there is of that unfathomable
grace she has taken with her, and you are suddenly cold
in her cardigan.