12gauge.com 2002

READING (OR DREAMING?) BORGES
Rex Swihart

(5/00)

Over a matter of days
from beneath the beautiful dustjacket
of his Collected Fictions
(that's right, the handsome centenary
edition; dominant color: blue-metallic;
prevailing feature: the sawtooth pages)
I unearthed (in no certain order):

The half-believed (or doubly unbelievable)
Buenos Aires and Uqbar in the prefecture: Borges

A Cervantes more subtle than Cervantes

A transmutable bullet (it has been other things in other times)
as old as Cain and Abel and as young as JFK

The Aleph: the letter that reaches simultaneously toward heaven and hell,
and the point (on the nineteenth step) that defies an already-impossible geometry

A younger man confiding in an older man (and vice versa)
along the Charles River, Cambridge: twice-Borges

A man of perfect memory (not Borges)

The tetragrammaton but not its secret

The replicate tough-and-knife or tough-and-gun (Borges' alter ego?)

Borges' other alter egos???: gauchos, pink corners, past or future Borges,
pampas, two-handed truco, labyrinths (including London), libraries,
encyclopedias, tigers (real, encyclopedic or blue), Argentine sunsets,
Anglo-Saxon, Ulrikke (afterwords Borges admits to pursuing the
subject herein, viz., love, more frequently in his poems), August 25, 1983,…

&&&

All of which, if extrapolated, might reasonably lead
one to posit yet other plausible absurdities,

e.g.,

The end of this slick-sheathed volume is the end of Borges

The translator of the Collected Fictions, along with the slew
of translators of the Selected Poems (which I'm slated to read next),
either wittingly or unwittingly conspired to resurrect a partial array
of Borgeses into a medium foreign to the literary Borges: i.e., English

I have not been reading Borges but dreaming Borges

In conclusion:

Borges has foreseen this poem, even predicted it
You could say he beat me to the punch
I am merely an alembic in an infinite chain of alembics
Perhaps at no time am I ever wholly myself
What Borges failed to elucidate in this little poem
I'm sure he's more fully explicated elsewhere
The moment he finished that curious nonsense about
Pierre Menard, he took a solitary walk in the city of Nimes
(even stopped by the Maison Carree),
returned to his rooms,
switched gears (one of his fortes)
and almost mechanically penned this poem

J.L.B.
Nimes, 1939

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