The Broken Jug by Octavio Paz

Summertime is often sweltering in Nebraska. July of 1962 was no different. With daily highs in the upper 90s, a poem that features flames, torches, candles, and fire was especially appropriate for the season. Octavio Paz’s “The Broken Jug” was published in the Summer 1962 edition of Prairie Schooner. Its mention of solitude, however, was increasingly contrary to conditions in Lincoln. Two years earlier, the 1960 census put the city’s population at just over 128,000: a whopping 30% increase from ten years prior! Perhaps the editors were trying to reclaim that sense of isolation?

The Broken Jug
Octavio Paz

Translated from the Spanish (Mexico) by Bruce Cutler

The inner eye opens and a world of vertigo
and flame is born beneath the forehead of the one who dreams:
blue suns, green whirlwinds, nibs of light that pick open stars
like pomegranates,
a solitary sunflower, golden eye gyring in the middle
of a burnt-lime esplanade.
crystal groves of sound, forests of echoes and replies
and waves, dialogue of transparencies,—
wind! gallop of water between the endless walls
of a throat of jet,
horse, comet, sky-rocket that drives itself exactly through
the heart of night, quills, water-jets,
feathers, sudden flowering of torches, candles, wings,
invasion of white,
birds of the islands singing beneath the forehead
of the one who dreams!

I opened my eyes; I raised them to the sky and saw how the night
was covering itself with stars.
Living islands! bracelets of islands aflame, rocks blazing,
breathing, grape-clusters of living rocks,
what a wellspring! what clarities, what tresses spread over a dark
shoulder,
what a river there above, and that far distant sound of water
next to fire, of light against shadow!
Harps, gardens of harps.

But there was no one next to me.
Only a plain: cactus, sponge-trees, huge stones that crack open
under the sun.
No cricket chirred;
there was a vague smell of lime and burnt seeds;
the village streets were dry arroyos
and the air would have shattered had someone
shouted, “Who’s alive?”