PLAINNESS
The garden’s grillework gate
opens with the ease of a page
in a well-thumbed book,
and, once inside, our eyes
have no need to dwell on objects
already fixed and exact in memory.
Here habits and minds and the private language all families invent
are everyday things to me.
What necessity is there to speak
or to pretend to be someone else?
The whole house knows me:
they’re aware of my worries and weakness.
This is the best that can happen –
what Heaven perhaps will grant us:
not be be wondered at, or required to succeed
but simply to be let in
as part of an undeniable Reality
like stones of the road, like trees.
Jorge Luis Borges
translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas di Giovanni
