As I was flicking through the pages of a book of poetry, a book written by one of my favorite writers, Jorge Luis Borges, my eyes caught the vanishing body of a very simple poem, a poem about all of us. Borges, greatly influenced by Buddhism, gives here an insighful rendering of this passing flow, this dance in which we are never the same:
Clouds
There cannot be a single thing which is not cloud. Cathedrals have it in that tree of boulders and stained glass with Bible myths that time will soon erase. The Odyssey contains it, changing like the sea, distinct each time we open it. Your mirrored face already is another face that blinked in day, our dubious labyrinth of space. We are the ones who leave. The multiple cloudbank dissolving in the dropping sun draws images of us. Ceaselessly the rose will become another rose. You are the cloud, the sea, you are oblivion, and you are whom you've lost, now very far.
in gassho
Taigu
