“The Moon” by J. L.

 Borges

History tells us how in that past time

When all things happened, real,

Imaginary, and dubious, a man

Conceived the unconscionable plan

Of making an abridgment of the universe

In a single book and with infinite zest

He towered his screed up, lofty and

Strenuous, polished it, spoke the final verse.

About to offer his thanks to fortune,

He lifted up his eyes and saw a burnished

Disc in the air and realized, stunned,

That somehow he had forgotten the moon.

The story I have told, although a tale,

Can represent the witching spell

So many of us use when at our craft

Of transmuting our life into words.

The essence is always lost. This is the one

Lay of every word about inspiration.

 Nor will this summary of mine avoid it

About my long traffic with the moon.

Where I saw it first I could not tell,

If in an earlier heaven than the teaching

Of the Greek, or some evening when it was reaching

Over the patio fig tree and the well.

As we know, this life being mutable

Can be, among many things, so beautiful

Because it brings some afternoon, with her,

The chance to gaze at you, oh varying moon.

But more than moons of the night I can

Remember those in verse: like that enchanted

Dragon moon so horrible in the ballad,

And then Quevedo with his moon of blood.

Of another moon of blood and scarlet

John spoke in his book about the ferocious

Monsters and their revelries;

And other clear moons with a silver sheen.

 Pythagoras (so tradition tells)

Wrote words of blood on a looking glass

That men could read with the naked eye

Reflected in that mirror in the sky.

And there’s the forest of iron where lurks

The enormous wolf whose destiny

Is to shatter the moon and do it to death

When the last dawn reddens the sea.

(Of this the prophetic North is aware

And how on that day the opened seas

Through all the world will be scoured by a ship

Fashioned of dead men’s nails.)

When in Geneva or Zurich fortune willed

That I should be a poet too,

I secretly assumed, as poets do,

The duty on me to define a moon.

Of faraway ivory, smoke, and the cold

Of snows were the moons that lit

My verses, which certainly were not fit

For the difficult honor of reaching print.

 I thought of the poet as being that man

Who, like red Adam in Paradise,

Lays down for everything its precise

And exact and not-known name.

Ariosto taught me that in the shifting

Moon are the dreams, the ungraspable,

Time that is lost, the possible

Or the impossible, which are the same.

Apollodorus let me descry

The magical shade of triform Diana;

And Hugo gave me a golden sickle,

An Irishman, his tragic obscure moon.

And, while I sounded the depths of that mine

Of mythology’s moons, just here

At the turn of a corner I could see

The celestial moon of every day.

Among all words I knew there is one

With the power to record and re-present.

The secret, I see, is with humble intent

To use it simply. Moon.

 Now I shall never dare to stain

Its pure appearing with a futile image;

I see it indecipherable and daily

And out of reach of my literature.

I know that the moon or the word moon

Is a letter that was created to share

In the complex scripture of that rare

Thing that we are, both manifold and one.

It is one of those symbols given to man

By fate or chance, which one day he

May use to write his own true name,

Uplifted in glory or in agony.

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]