Jorge Luis Borges

The Art of Poetry
By Jorge Luis Borges

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
nto a muic, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness-such is poetry
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
dislosing to each ofus his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

(I did not find a translator's name .)

In this poem, I found poetry, art, life, dreams and blended together into one; and I believe that life is that way and that we drift into one dream and then into another and we call it life. Life is the poetry that makes up our dreams, our world both out there in the heavens, the world around us and the world within. Borges who became blind must have felt the line between the outer and inner worlds disappear even more than many of us. As I grow older, I float through this life more and more as in a dream.