Anticipation of Love

Neither the intimacy of your look, your brow fair as a feast day

not the favor of your body, still mysterious, reserved, and childlike,

nor what comes to me of your life, settling in words or silence

will be so mysterious a gift

as the sight of your sleep enfolded

in the vigil of my arms.

Virgin again, miraculously, by the absolving power of sleep.

quiet and luminous like some happy thing recovered by memory,

you will give up that shore of your life that you yourself do not own.

Cast up into silence

I shall discern that ultimate beach of your being

and see you for the first time, perhaps,

as God must see you---

the fiction of Time destroyed,

free from love, from me.

-- Jorge Luis Borges (1899- 1986)