Break of Day

In the deep night of the universe
scarcely contradicted by the streetlamps
a lost gust of wind
has offended the taciturn streets
like the trembling premonition
of the horrible dawn that prowls
the ruined suburbs of the world.
Curious about the shadows
and daunted by the threat of dawn,
I recalled the dreadful conjecture
of Schopenhauer and Berkeley
which declares that the world
is a mental activity,
a dream of souls,
without foundation, purpose, weight, or shape.
And since ideas
are not eternal like marble
but immortal like a forest or a river,
this doctrine
assumed another form as the sun rose,
and in the superstition of that hour
when light like a climbing vine
begins to implicate the shadowed walls,
my reason gave way and sketched the following fancy:
If things are void of substance
and if this teeming Buenos Aires
is no more than a dream
made up by souls in a common act of magic,
there is an instant
when its existence is gravely endangered
and that is the shuddering instant of daybreak
when those who are dreaming the world are few
and only the ones who have been up all night retain,
ashen and barely outlines,
the image of the streets that later others will define. . . .

But again the world has been spared.
Light roams the streets inventing dirty colors
and with a certain remorse
for my complicity in the day's rebirth
I ask my house to exist,
amazed and icy in the white light,
as one bird halts the silence
and the spent night
stays on in the eyes of the blind.

Jorge Luis Borges

Translated by Stephen Kessler. From Poems of the Night, a Penguin Classics compilation of Borges poems translated by several different authors, with the Spanish on the facing page, a truly wonderful little volume.