The Wall

Fernando Paz Castillo (Caracas, 1893-1981)



"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," —that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
—John Keats



I
A wall in the afternoon
and in the hour
a white line, indefinite
over the green field
and under the sky.


II
A bird—on the leaf—
has placed its most beautiful song
over the wall.


III
Grieved by its own existence
—stopped amid its brief shadow
and its destiny—
a vulture, beautiful in its distance and flight,
induces anguish in the prophetic soul
a cold anguish, when
accurate, like a defeated arrow
—dark arrow that holds its first impulse—
drops beyond the wall.


IV
Life is a constant
and beautiful destruction:
to live is to do harm.


V
But the wall,
the silent white wall
seems to say:
"Your eyes reach up to here,
duller than your instinct.

I separate your life from other small
lives; though large at sunset,
when the insinuating gold of sunset arrives."


VI
Perhaps beyond the wall,
as high to desire as low to hope,
nothing exists after what is already seen on the road
next to life and death,
the truce and pain
and God's indifferent shadow.


VII
God—a wall facing memories and visions—
is alone, intimately alone
in our eyes
and in the small name
that ties him to things;
to the canary's fraternal silk
song
and to the night in which the vulture flies:
funereal, polished case for yesterday's things, beautiful
or sad
what will be so again
on this side of the wall,
with the recent fear of returning to the source.


VIII
Dying?...
But if nothing is more beautiful in its hour
—facing the wall—
than the dying one's serene eyes,
denied by their own silence;
already lost, amid newfound spikes,
the fear of dying,
and of having lived, as a man, among men,
who barely—darkened in their existence—
understood them.


IX
So then the wall
seems to invade itself amid forgotten anger
and hope:
It is a sudden path, not the border of shadow and song,
facing a new God who awaits us
—who always awaits us—
and who we will not know
even though he follows in our path;
who arrives to us from afar,
astride the light,
and who we leave behind along the path,
like something, which is not earth,
tied, however, to our feet.


X
The wall in the afternoon,
amid the grass, the song and the funereal light:
presence of the pain of living
and not dying;
consolation of returning, in earth and gold,
with the anxiety of having been;
dust and gold that return eternally,
like daily death,
beneath the insomniac night's grain of wheat,
murmuring with high wind
and morning star.
The famished heart feels ecstasy:
the beloved and the heart, timid words
smell, as the wall in the afternoon,
like sky and earth confused,
when dying is our own affair
and, being ours, we love it.
We love it shyly,
silently, without violence,
while others fear—still distant—
the sensitive newborn solitude
for man, inhuman, and his blurred destiny.


XI
Because there is no death only life
on that side of song, on that side of flight,
on that side of time.


XII
Vague intuition of endurance
facing the dark and
ambitious death...
Because death, an image of us
and our creature,
is not the same as non-life
which has never existed.
Since God's verb, which has placed all
in man's conscience, could not create death
without his own death and his quiet nostalgia
for thinking and suffering human forms.


XIII
The afternoon's wall—dusk in our afternoon—,
is barely a white line beside the field
and beside the sky.
Mysterious cross that only shows
its horizontal arm.
Joined, by its dark root,
to the very earth of its blurred origin;
and to the sky of escape
by song and the wing:
the vulture's impassive night
and the canary's gold path
toward sunset.


XIV
The wall!
How I feel its silence and how it weighs
—in my afternoon—
in the moss's afternoon
and the prayer
and the return.


XV
I only know there is a wall,
beautiful in its quiet solitude of sky and time:
And everything, beside it, is a miracle.


XVI
I only fear in the golden afternoon—in my afternoon—
for the agonizing sun; and for something that is not sun,
also agonizing in my conscience,
sometimes desolate
and sometimes confused by surprise!
I only fear having seen something:
the same!
the field, the lawn;
the same sensual rose that reminds me of certain lips
and the same exhausted lily
guarding death.


XVII
And facing God and his Destiny, I only feel
I have passed by the wall once
along its thick quiet shadow,
on that side of time.




1964




Fernando Paz Castillo, "El muro," Poesía, Selección, prólogo y cronología de Oscar Sambrano Urdaneta (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1986).