for jorge luis borges
with relief, with humiliation, with terror,yr poems & stories, borges, tore open
he understood that he also was an illusion,
that someone else was dreaming him…
from the circular ruins
spaces i might more thoroughly explore;
made me dream a sorcerer’s dream, pried
me open to supernatural purpose, pointed
me to treasure in dialectic vision, made
me dare dream up a writer, myself anew/
renewed, in minute entirety. u snatched
back from the dead, back from the
world’s ruin & absence, bereft of color,
syllable & nuance, the remains of my
aborted verse; served them up to me in
the incoherence & vertigo of dreamstuff
& like some fiery multiple demiurge
made me look upon them again & again,
take them back into myself & refashion
them with my spirit hands, making rope
of them as if they were sand, coining
them as if they were wind, penning them
as if they were truly mine. i kneaded
them into poemshapes & breathed into
them, like orişanla, the arch divinity,
nurturing my deformed creations back to
health with the same love & veneration
bestowed on my few fiddlefit &
fettlefine. i watched them all come alive
& grow & knew as u knew that in this
same way i was wrought; in this same
way i was made.
© Joseph McNair; 2009
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