The world did not begin with me
it will not end with me
I am one pulsebeat in the throbbing river
Octavio Paz: Poems, edited and tr. by Eliot Weinbergner, from ‘Identical Time’
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Octavio Paz, tr. by Lysander Kemp, from An Anthology of Spanish Poetry: From the Beginnings to the Present Day, Including Both Spain and Spanish America; "The broken waterjar"
[Text ID: "the pomegranate stars,"]
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Some cry with tears; others with thoughts.
Octavio Paz
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(...) because two bodies, naked and entwined,
leap over time, they are invulnerable,
nothing can touch them, they return to the source,
there is no you, no I, no tomorrow,
no yesterday, no names, the truth of two
in a single body, a single soul,
Octavio Paz, from “Sunstone/Piedra De Sol”
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"I’ve found a prisoner’s letters to a lover—
One begins: “These words may never reach you.”
Another ends: “The skin dissolves in dew
without your touch.”
—Agha Shahid Ali, from "The Country Without a Post-Office"
"Unreachable as I think of you, touching you with my eyes, watching you with my hands."
—Octavio Paz, from "Before the Beginning" (trans. Eliot Weinberger)
"Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color."
—W.S. Merwin, from “Separation"
"I love you, I'm waiting for you unbearably..."
—Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra
"Who does not know what it is like to go with a friend to a railway station and then to watch the train take them away? As you walk along the platform back into the city, the person who has just gone is often more there, more totally there, than when you embraced them before they climbed into the train. When we embrace to say goodbye, maybe we do it for this reason—to take into our arms what we want to keep when they’ve gone."
—John Berger, "Will It Be a Likeness?"
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