The yawning life in the bark, the brown water

 After Borges ' Ars Poetica'

The yawning life in the bark, the brown water
sustains the leaves, the winding of the river
describes the delta. The lakes written by rivers
with elbows and arms that distribute the water

as if it were a language. The bayous sleep
and the pastures are quiet under the death
of night. How quick and senseless is the death
of the moth? How mysterious is the sleeping

planet, the wandering labyrinthine symbol
without a definition? The Sun whirls in years,
a dozen here and there, a thousand years
without a thought or language, without symbols

illuminating god. We've marked the Sunset
with an architecture, the ridiculous poetry
of mystics, the juvenile exercises of poetry
encumbered by a vanity. The wide Sun sets

on the flat water and I remember the face
of my beloved, the face that, like a mirror,
shows only my self. The dreaming water mirrors
illusions, makes ambiguous her soft face

and discloses her heart. The expanding breast
of the blue jay sings a song, I am in love
with a brief dream, I am maddened by a love
that knows no bounds! O love! O virgin breast!

Are we not but asleep? The unveiled end
is somehow veiled again, the Sun's the same
in any hemisphere. The bark is the same
at the beginning of the tree as at the end.