I Read Borges Poems

I read Borges poems And the Night opens up a vast and different kind of Memory Histories of place I have never been Faces I have never seen Questions of Identity Streets I will never walk in Too long and deserted To truly contemplate- Fame and its follies The delusions of a name Death and destinies Games of words Encyclopedias of strange tribes Anthropologies of gestures A voice and tones of thinkers long unknown Books rewritten Literature as life Reading as adventuring Labyrinths, hourglasses, imaginary swords and battles And loves whose only realization is their longing Solitude and its self- deceptions Escape and its consolations The long road in poems and parables Old age and the regrets of what one has never done- I read Borges And there is the joy of the real thing What only Literature can give Life is more when read about Than when lived - A seeming in the silence Where even the most beautiful words on the page Are best seen as echoes of past worlds greater and more glorious Long lines on the page defining worlds far away and forever mysterious Time passing unapproachable.