The annual Octavio Paz poem on this date:

Pause

They’ve come:

a few birds

and a black thought.

Murmur of trees,

murmur of trains and engines,

is this moment coming or going?

The silence of the sun

is beyond lamentation and laughter,

it sinks its beak

deep in the rocks’ rock scream.

Heart-sun, beating rock,

blood rock that becomes a fruit:

wounds open without pain,

my life flows on, resembling life.

* * *

Happy 22nd, bro. It’s another stellar Grandma’s Marathon day, even if there’s no marathon to run this year. (Okay, a friend and I ran a spontaneous half anyway.) I’ve just committed myself to our city yet again. Confined here in recent months, I’ve come to appreciate it more than ever before: what beauty surrounds us. We don’t need closure. This dream, it never needs to end.