NP Labor Day Weekend Meditation

[s~Z]

To Whoever is Reading Me 
By JORGE LUIS BORGES                 

You are invulnerable. Have they not granted you, 
those powers that preordain your destiny, 
the certainty of dust? Is not your time 
as irreversible as that same river 
where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol 
of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you 
which you will not read--on it, already written, 
the date, the city, and the epitaph. 
Other men too are only dreams of time, 
not indestructible bronze or burnished gold; 
the universe is, like you, a Proteus. 
Dark, you will enter the darkness that awaits you, 
doomed to the limits of your traveled time. 
Know that in some sense you are already dead. 
--TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY
ALASTAIR REID 

>From "Selected Poems," by Jorge Luis Borges,
edited by Alexander Coleman (Viking: 478 pp., $40)