from Four Versions of Borges

‘Yo’

The skull unseen, the heart invisible,

the motorways and byways of the blood

I cannot fix, inconstant as the god

Proteus, all nerves, guts, bones; as physical

as change itself, I am these things. And yet –

I am, too, the memory of a scimitar

slicing down the sun, and a blood-red sunset

turning grey, and darkening, and a single cellular star.

Lookout on the world’s shore, I see the ships

endlessly replanked. I am the numbered books

and letters thin with time, the dry codex,

words mouthed indecently by long-dead lips.

Stranger, even, are these words I write

in a room somewhere, full of dust and light.