Mirrors by Jorge Luis Borges

<p>Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman</p><p> </p><p>              Mirrors</p><p>By Jorge Luis Borges</p><p> </p><p>I have been horrified before all mirrors</p><p>not just before the impenetrable glass,</p><p>the end and the beginning of that space,</p><p>inhabited by nothing but reflections,</p><p> </p><p>but faced with specular water, mirroring</p><p>the other blue within its bottomless sky,</p><p>incised at times by the illusory flight</p><p>of inverted birds, or troubled by a ripple,</p><p> </p><p>or face to face with the unspeaking surface</p><p>of ghostly ebony whose very hardness</p><p>reflects, as if within a dream, the whiteness</p><p>of spectral marble or a spectral rose.</p><p> </p><p>Now, after so many troubling years</p><p>of wandering beneath the wavering moon,</p><p>I ask myself what accident of fortune</p><p>handed to me this terror of all mirrors–</p><p> </p><p>mirrors of metal and the shrouded mirror</p><p>of sheer mahogany which in the twilight</p><p>of its uncertain red softens the face</p><p>that watches and in turn is watched by it.</p><p> </p><p>I look on them as infinite, elemental</p><p>fulfillers of a very ancient pact</p><p>to multiply the world, as in the act</p><p>of generation, sleepless and dangerous.</p><p> </p><p>They extenuate this vain and dubious world</p><p>within the web of their own vertigo.</p><p>Sometimes at evening they are clouded over</p><p>by someone's breath, someone who is not dead.</p><p> </p><p>The glass is watching us. And if a mirror</p><p>hangs somewhere on the four walls of my room,</p><p>I am not alone. There's an other, a reflection</p><p>which in the dawn enacts its own dumb show.</p><p> </p><p>Everything happens, nothing is remembered</p><p>in those dimensioned cabinets of glass</p><p>in which, like rabbits in fantastic stories,</p><p>we read the lines of text from right to left.</p><p> </p><p>Claudius, king for an evening, king in a dream,</p><p>did not know he was a dream until the day</p><p>on which an actor mimed his felony</p><p>with silent art