To Octavio Paz

You were lost in disappearances

You reappeared in transparencies.

Vertiginous, you whirled around your reflection,

Clear cut as the air you dissolved back into.

Furiously you touched things with your eye

In a brush stroke of language,

Your body resolving invisibly back into the page

And your burning syllables thrown into the air,

Scattered like seeds that birds flew away with

To aeries of sound and silence

In stone clefts of poetic insight.

I see you now swimming inside your woman

In the land of closed eyes.