To Whoever is Reading Me

You are invulnerable. Have they not granted you,

those powers that preordain your destiny,

the certainty of dust? Is not your time

as irreversible as that same river

where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol

of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you

which you will not read--on it, already written,

the date, the city, and the epitaph.

Other men too are only dreams of time,

not indestructible bronze or burnished gold;

the universe is, like you, a Proteus.

Dark, you will enter the darkness that awaits you,

doomed to the limits of your traveled time.

Know that in some sense you are already dead.

--TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY ALASTAIR REID

From “Selected Poems,” by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman (Viking: 478 pp., $40)