From Dias Habiles (Lawful Days) (1958-1961)
Cold rapid hands
Draw back one by one
The bandages of dark
I open my eyes
still
I am living
at the center
of a wound still fresh
About Octavio Paz
Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture. Source: http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1990/paz-bio.html