Leaning over the balcony
                 I see

(Never lean on a balcony
when you’re alone,
the Chinese poet writes)

It is not height nor the night and its moon
it is not the infinities that can be seen
but memory and its vertigoes
This that I see
            this spinning
is the tricks and traps
behind it there is nothing
it is the whirlwind of days

— Octavio Paz, from “East Slope,” The Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1991)