Friday, March 19, 2010

Emanuel Swedenborg by Jorge Luis Borges

He walked taller than the others,
That man remote among men;
The names he called, if he would call them,
Secret to angels. He could view
What earthbound eyes can not see:
Ardent geometry, the crystalline
Structure of God and the whirlwind
Of the sordid infernal appetites.
He knew that the Glory and the Underworld
Reside within your soul, with your mythologies;
He knew, like the Greek, those days
Made from time are mirrors of the Eternal.
Registering in arid Latin
Ultimate things without why or where.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Sea by Jorge Luis Borges

Before the dream (or the terror) could weave
Mythologies and cosmogonies,
Before the time could mint itself into days,
The sea, the always sea, it had been and it was.
Who is the sea? Who is that violent
Antique being that gnaws at the pillars
Of the earth and is one and many of the seas
And abyss and splendor and chance and wind?
Who looks on it sees it for the first time.
Always. With that wonder which all things
Elementary leave behind, the beauty
In evenings, the moon, flame of the bonfire.
Who is the sea, who am I? I will know it
In the days to come that follow the agony.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Finally

And to think for good
This all could be made quite well
With two open mouths

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

I by Jorge Luis Borges

The bones of the head, the heart that beats in secret,
The pathways of the blood I can not see,
The tunneling of the dream, old Proteus,
The viscera, the nape, the skeleton.
I am all those things. Incredibly,
I am also the memory of a blade
And a solitary sun sinking downward
Dispersing into gold, into shade, and then nothing.
I am the one that sees the bows coming to port;
I am numbered books, the numbered
Engravings worn away by time;
I am the one with jealousy for the dead.
It is even stranger to be the man stitching together
All the words inside of the room of a house.