Poem by Jorge Luis Borges

The night assigns the sleepers a task
a witch’s task – the undoing of this whole world,
its countless branches
of causes and effects, sinking into the
bottomless cycle of time’s circulation.
The night wants you to forget, for one night,
yourself, your origin, and your ancestors,
that point unreachable by geometry,
the line, the plane, the pyramid, the cube,
the cylinder and the sphere, the ocean and its waves,
the pillow beneath your cheek, the thin fold of fresh sheets…
the empires, their emperors, Shakespeare,
and – the heaviest of all things – your love.
How strange: this rose-scented circle
erases the cosmos, opening a path to chaos.