Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature. In this essay, Kelly examines the third stanza of Paz's poem as a noticeably strange part of a poem that is itself deliberately unusual.

Octavio Paz wrote poetry for over fifty years, and he published extensive essays and articles about the nature of art. The mysteries of most of his works have been addressed and usually accounted for in some way. Still, there are fragments and stray lines that just do not make sense. Part of this was to the point: Paz wrote in a postmodern style, well aware of the technique that he used and the ways in which it violated the common understanding of logic. Even knowing this, though, does not keep readers from wondering what particular lines mean, especially when they appear in a context where everything else has a meaning, even if that meaning...