the cassandra pages: Mexican poetry in the garden

He hands me the white book
by the flowering fava beans:
Octavio writing of cinnamon sails
billowing with wind --
the breathing of breasts.

At the garden today, a friend lent me a bilingual edition of the complete poems of Octavio Paz. I opened it to the poem below which we read together. My Spanish is very poor but I recognize many words - canela, for instance: cinnamon; iglesia: church - and can figure out others. This friend, who is Canadian-American, lived in Mexico for quite a while and knows the country well; he's fluent in Spanish and French and English, and I am envious! He's away for a week and asked me to water his vegetable garden, in a different community garden than mine, closer to my studio. So J. and I met him there and he showed us his fava beans and tomatoes, his lettuces and mustards, and the routine of watering, and then we had a wide-ranging conversation about plants, politics, poetry, and places we've lived and visited, while sitting in the very welcome sun.

I've copied the first two stanzas out in Spanish, and the entire poem in English. It's from Paz's book East Slope, poems written between 1962 and 1968.

COCHIN

1.
Para vernos pasar
se alza de puntillas
dimunata y blanquisima
entre los cocoteros,
la iglesia portuguesa

2.
Velas color canela.
El viento se levanta :
respiración de senos.

1.
Standing on tiptoe
to watch us go by
among the coco-palms
tiny and white,
the Portugese church.

2.
Cinnamon-colored sails.
The wind picks up.
breasts in breath.

3.
With shawls of foam,
jasmine in their hair
and earrings of gold
they go off to six o'clock mass
not in Mexico City or Cádiz:
in Travancore.

4.
Beating more furiously
before the Nestorian patriarch:
my heretical heart.

5.
In the Christian cemetery graze
dogmatic
probably Shivaite
cows.

6.
The same eyes see, the same afternoon:
the bougainvillaea with its thousand arms,
elephantiasis with its violet legs,
between the pink sea and the jaundiced palms.