Poem of the Gifts

death identity free verse somber

May no one slight, with tears or a reproach, This statement of God’s mastery, That, with sublime irony, Gave me at once books and the night. He vested those lightless eyes With guardianship of the city of books, Even though they can read But senseless passages in the library of dreams, Where sunrises give way to zeal. The day Lavishes them in vain with infinite books, Toilsome like the manuscripts That perished in Alexandria. Of hunger and of thirst (or so goes the Greek legend) A king once died amidst fountains and gardens; Aimless and unrelenting I tire the confines Of this blind vault of a slender library. Encyclopedias, atlases, the East And West, centuries, dynasties, Symbols, the cosmos and cosmogonies, Afford us the walls, albeit uselessly. Slow by my shadow, I explore the Hollow penumbra with a tottering crosier, I, who imagined Paradise Under the figment of a library. Something unnamed, certainly not Random fate, governs all this; Somebody else has already received in hazy Evenings the many books, and their shadow. As I rove through the slow galleries, I happen to feel with sacred horror that I am the other, the dead one, who must have Ambled his days past, in a similar vein. Who between the two writes this poem of A plural me albeit of just one shadow? Who cares about the word convoking me If the anathema is one and indivisible? Groussac or Borges, I behold this dear World both distorting and dying down Into a pale, vague ash, all too Similar to both slumber and oblivion.