I Read Borges Poems Poem by Shalom Freedman

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.