I speak of the city

News today and tomorrow a ruin, buried and resurrected every day,
lived together in streets, plazas, buses, taxis, movie houses,
theaters, bars, hotels, pigeon coops and catacombs, the enormous city
that fits in a room three yards square, and endless as a galaxy. the
city that dreams us all, that all of us build and unbuild and rebuild
as we dream. the city we all dream, that relentlessly changes while
we dream it, the city that wakes every hundred years and looks at
itself in the mirror of a word and doesn't recognize itself and goes
back to sleep. The city that sprouts from the eyelids of the woman
who sleeps at my side, and she is transformed, with its monuments and
statues, its histories and legends.
To go back- are we asleep or awake?-we are, we are nothing more, day
breaks, it's early, we are in the city, we cannot leave except to fall
into another city, different yet identical. I speak of the immense
city, that daily reality composed of two words: the others. I speak
of the forest of stone, the desert of the prophets, the ant-heap of
souls, the congregation of tribes, the house of mirrors, the labyrinth
of echoes, the delirium of symmetries. I speak of the city, shepherd
of centuries, mother that gives birth to us and devours us, that
creates us and forgets.
Octavio Paz
A Tree Within