El reposo del fuego / The Repose of Fire
Poetry , 1966
Tusquets
Pages: 72
Fire—in perpetual transformation—is the true mirror of our being. Its form reveals its constant movement. Fickle and inconsistent, it transmutes everything; a becoming that consumes all with its eternal, voracious appetite. Though it was Heraclitus who, through thought, arrived at this primordial truth, it is the poet who uncovers that "everything is oblivion, shadow, resolution." Like the flames of a bonfire that rise to the heavens in a dance that enchants with its suggestive and anarchic cadence, fire "is the world that extinguishes and changes / to last (it always was) eternally."
Originally published in 1963 and divided into three parts, The Repose of Fire by José Emilio Pacheco embarks on one of the most extraordinary poetic adventures in Ibero-American literature. This extensive poem is an exhortation to suspend time before everything becomes clouded and only the embers of oblivion remain.