>> And bringing us a couple centuries further towards the Contemporary,
this is a poem from a living Mexican poet named Alfonso D'Aquino and it's written --
He was kind of an ecopoet before
we had a word like ecopoetry.
He lives out in -- Away from the cities.
He knows all the medicinal plants and the little lizards
that do push-ups on the rocks outside his house.
And the stars, he knows pretty well.
This is written in two columns and it can be read vertically, the columns read vertically
and they also read across horizontally.
So it's a real challenge to translate to get it to work.
One thing you should know is -- Well, let me -- I'll read Spanish.
I'll read a column vertically in the Spanish, then I'll read the English across
and the aile is the Spanish word for an alder tree.
So vertically.
No tiene ninguna forma la hoja en medio de las hojas.
Las hojas no son el aile, sino el aire que lo copa y una copa cabe en otra,
dentro de una sola hoja.
Movimiento de la fronda que desvela otra rosa y una en otra se transforma,
como un cielo entre dos hojas.
Invisible rama loca se retuerce por sí sola.
Si una hoja y otra hoja siempre son la misma hoja.
Frond.
It's formless, from within the leaves I see the leaf in the middle, one brushing another
of the leaves that keeps it company, leaves aren't the alder, all the tree of leaf,
but the air that holds all the alder and its sleeve and more leaves.
And trees drink each other in and a frond emerges from one of them.
Tangled in the branches, a singular leaf among the leaves.
Gesticulation of that frond from within its patterns,
I see disclosing in the shadowed bower another flower, the other flower,
and each moves into the other and the phylum transfluoresces, like a sky and visibly woven end
between two leaves, opening out wild invisible branch the stock and the corolla twisting,
spirals darkening into one form and digging in.
If one leaf and another leaf from the unseen branch always are to the shade
of this leaf, the same leaf falling, broken.
Sweet, sweet poem.
Alfonso D'Aquino.
Octavio Paz discovered him when he was like 22 and published his first book
and the first thing he did, like Jack Gilbert, you know, was move away from the city
and stay away from all the famous other poets and just write his own work kind of quietly.