Daily Fire
Like air
making and unmaking
—on geology’s pages
on planetary tables—
its invisible buildings
is man.
His language is barely a seed
yet burns
on space’s open palm.
Syllables show incandescently.
As such, they’re plants:
their roots
fracturing the silence,
their branches
build homes in the sound.
Syllables:
they entangle and untangle,
playing
in likeness and unlikeness.
Syllables:
ripening in minds,
flowering in mouths.
Their roots
drink night, eat up light.
Languages:
trees incandescing
with leaves of rain.
Vegetation out of lightning,
geometry out of echoes:
on the sheet of paper
the poem arises
like day
on space’s open palm.
- Octavio Paz; translated from the Spanish by Ted Roland