modest divinity

  

.

We are our memory,

we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,

that pile of broken mirrors

 

—Jorge Luis Borges
from Cambridge

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When misfortune confounds us
in an instant we are saved
by the humblest actions
of memory or attention:
the taste of fruit, the taste of water,
that face returned to us in dream,
the first jasmine flowers of November,
the infinite yearning of the compass,
a book we thought forever lost,
the pulsing of a hexameter,
the little key that opens a house,
the smell of sandalwood or library,
the ancient name of a street,
the colourations of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date that we were searching for,
counting the twelve dark bell-strokes,
a sudden physical pain.

Eight million the deities of Shinto
who travel the earth, secretly.
Those modest divinities touch us,
touch us, and pass on by.
 

—Jorge Luis Borges
this is Borges

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You don’t remember what happened.  

What you remember becomes what happened. 

—John Green

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