5 May 2020: "Music Box" by JORGE LUIS BORGES

TRANSLATED BY TONY BARNSTONE

Music of Japan. Parsimoniously

from the water clock the drops unfold

in lazy honey or ethereal gold

that over time reiterates a weave

eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright.

I fear that every one will be the last.

They are a yesterday come from the past.

But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight

garden, what vigils by an unknown sea,

and from what modest melancholy, from

what lost and rediscovered afternoon

do they arrive at their far future: me?

Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play

I am. I want to be. I bleed away.

1 May 2020: "We thirst at first..." by Emily Dickinson

WE thirst at first,—’t is Nature’s act;
And later, when we die,
A little water supplicate
Of fingers going by.
It intimates the finer want,	5
Whose adequate supply
Is that great water in the west
Termed immortality. -Emily Dickinson