In Compliment Of Shadows Poem by jia shuixing

Old age (as others call it)
may be the time of our bliss.
The animal has died or almost died.
Man and his soul remain.
Alive between bright, vague forms
that are not, yet, the shade.

Buenos Aires,
that used to tear itself into suburbs
all the way to the unyielding flatness,
has reversed to la Recoleta, el Retiro,
the fuzzy streets of the Eleven
and the precarious old houses
that we still call the South.

In my life things were always too many;
Democritus of Abdera got his eyes put out to think;
time has been my Democritus.
This gloom is slow and painless;
it flows down a smooth hill
and resembles eternity.

My friends have no face,
women are what they were so many years ago,
one street corner could be another,
there are no letters on the pages of books.
All of this should frighten me,
but it is a sweetness, a return.
Of the generations of texts on Earth
I have but read a few,
the ones that I keep reading in my memory,
reading and transforming.
From the South, the East, the West, the North,
converge the paths that have brought me
to my secret centre.

Those paths were echoes and steps,
women, men, agonies, resurrections,
days and nights,
half-dreams and dreams,
each negligible instant of yesterday
and of the world's yesterdays,
the firm Danish sword and the Persian moon,
the deeds of the dead,
love shared, the words,
Emerson and the snow and so many things

I can forget them now. I arrive at my center,
at my algebra and my key,
at my mirror.
Soon I'll know who I am.

(translation of Elogio de la Ceguera by Borges)