Tag Archives: Octavio Paz

Passage to the Americas

Passage from India. Passage to the Americas. Walt captains the Persona back from the “streams of the Indus and the Ganges.” “Circumnavigation.” Pacific blue.

I had not intended it. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. It was a discovery of the writing itself. The journey was so arduous I had wanted to end it in India, go back to the moon… “have done, have done, with every vain, dinning complexity.” I might have thought of it a few times, but always dismissed it, couldn’t see a way through South America.

And then I stood on the pachisi courtyard. Alone. Believing it was time to return to the moon.

Borges opened the door, showed me the way, my reading of him, forty years ago, overwhelmed me to my utter amazement. The structure through the struggle. Neruda’s “The Heights of Machu Picchu,” Octavio Paz, Archibald MacLeish’s “Conquistador.”

Mayans, Aztecs, Incans. Argentina’s “disappeared.” Borges, through a mirror…

Frederick Glaysher