"Poetic Art" by Jorge Luis Borges

To look at the river made of time and water

And to remember that time is another river,

to know that we lose ourselves like the river

And that faces pass like the water.

~

To feel that the vigil is another dream

That dreams to not dream and that the death

that frightens our flesh is that death

of every night, that is called dreaming.

~

To see in the day or in the year a symbol

of the days of the man and his years

Turning into the affront of the years

In a music, a rumor, and a symbol.

~

To see in death the dream, in the sunset

a sad gold, such is poetry

which is immortal and poor. Poetry

returns like the daybreak and the sunset

~

At times in the afternoon a face

watches us from the depths of a mirror;

Art should be like that mirror

that reveals to us our own face.

~

They say that Ulysses, sick of wonders,

cried of love at the sight of his Ithaca

green and humble. Art is that Ithaca

of green eternity, not of wonders.

~

It is also like the interminable river

that passes and stays and is a crystal of a same

fickle Heraclitus, that is the same

and is another, like the interminable river.