Más allá de este afán y de este verso
me aguarda inagotable el universo.
– Borges
Then I think of Borges going blind,
of what he said about the soul.
He was trying to understand
why a man who was losing the world
would seek out swords and monsters,
blunt-voiced Saxons in the mead hall.
It’s that the soul must know it’s immortal,
he said, and its hungry turning circle
takes everything in, achieves all that’s possible.
There’s a kind of secret knowledge
enfolds us, reaches everything we do
or else all we do is the knowledge and the soul.
Beyond all this, the sweated grammar,
the effort to know one thing after another,
on the other side of the poem the universe is waiting,
patient and inexhaustible. Time and again
the light keeps fading from what we love
though we turn and turn to it, singing
to blunt the darkness, to fold the light back in.
Peter Sirr’s most recent books are Intimate City: Dublin Essays and The Gravity Wave, both published by The Gallery Press. He is a member of Aosdána, and lives in Dublin.
Then I think of Borges going blind,
of what he said about the soul.
He was trying to understand
why a man who was losing the world
would seek out swords and monsters,
blunt-voiced Saxons in the mead hall.
It’s that the soul must know it’s immortal,
he said, and its hungry turning circle
takes everything in, achieves all that’s possible.
There’s a kind of secret knowledge
enfolds us, reaches everything we do
or else all we do is the knowledge and the soul.
Beyond all this, the sweated grammar,
the effort to know one thing after another,
on the other side of the poem the universe is waiting,
patient and inexhaustible. Time and again
the light keeps fading from what we love
though we turn and turn to it, singing
to blunt the darkness, to fold the light back in.
Peter Sirr’s most recent books are Intimate City: Dublin Essays and The Gravity Wave, both published by The Gallery Press. He is a member of Aosdána, and lives in Dublin.
