I sold her to a waiter friend who immediately began to chop her into little pieces, which he carefully de­posited in the buckets where bottles are chilled.

There in the mountains, among the tall pines and precipices, I breathed the cold thin air like a thought of liberty

stuttering a single syllable

master of a limited number of souls and bodies

And when I was at the point of death, and purple, she deposited me on the bank and began to kiss me, saying I don't know what things.

Certain nights her skin was covered with phospho­rescence and to embrace her was to embrace a piece of night tattooed with fire.

calm water.

a little snail

But never did I reach the center of her being. Never did I touch the nakedness of pain and of death. Perhaps it does not exist in waves, that secret site that renders a woman vulnerable and mortal. that electric button where all interlocks, twitches, and straightens out to then swoon.

Nothing is comparable to sleeping in those waters, to wake pounded by a thousand happy light lashes, by a thousand assaults that withdrew laughing

it enveloped me like music or some giant lips

If I embraced her, she swelled with pride, in­ credibly tall, like the liquid stalk of a poplar; and soon that thinness flowered into a fountain of white feathers,

into a plume of smiles

shined with teeth

All was beach, sand, a bed of sheets that were always fresh.

blue reflec­tions,

poured me in the engine

Surre­alist poets.

that !tfe In the cIty was not what she had been able to imagine

In spite of the shouts of the others wh,p grabbed her by her float­ing clothes, she clutched my arm and went off with me leaping.

Paz has been an outspoken social critic, a philosopher, an essayist, and a leading figure in the renaissance ofLatin American literature.

你是研究生物科技的. 孫子能給我嗎? 有你們兩個的基因的

Lonely boy.

婆婆’ means husband’s mother and ‘公公’ means husband’s father.

他上月向我求婚

我找到了我的對象

The water gets it though and I stay dry.

Water doesn’t fall when I say that.

It’s stupid to be in the same house as him and still miss him so much

Since I’m trying to get time alone with my parents, one of them is always a witness.

The rest of the day is like an extremely tedious game of basketball.

She just enjoys showing me the dry air.

They just make it extremely obvious that you’re hedging against the truth.

How dare you?

It’s like the adults were all my nieces’ age and someone told them there was no Santa Claus.

He nudges himself against me then holds me as if only I can fit in that gap between his arms and chest.

Matt, this isn’t a root canal.

Coming from anyone else, that sentence would make me feel too stupid to live. Still, he has a point. I fumble but can’t find any words to answer

Oh, if there’s anything Gus can do, it’s put up a brave front. He does that stony-faced thing where his mouth is set in a grim, straight line better than anyone I know. But behind his hard, blue eyes, I can see the fear that’s not there even when some paradox rips him apart.

Gus stops instantly

Fundamental laws of physics do that. Profound theorems of mathematics do that.

Gus is up to a minute now and I wish he’d blurt something unequivocal.

holding out for as long as possible