BORGES

I

 The useless dawn finds me in a deserted street-
    corner; I have outlived the night.
 Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy waves
    laden with all the hues of deep spoil, laden with
    things unlikely and desirable.
 Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals,
    of things half given away, half withheld,
    of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act
    that way, I tell you.
 The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds
    and odd ends: some hated friends to chat
    with, music for dreams, and the smoking of
    bitter ashes.  The things my hungry heart
    has no use for.
 The big wave brought you.
 Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily
    and incessantly beautiful.  We talked and you
    have forgotten the words.
 The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street
    of my city.
 Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to
    make your name, the lilt of your laughter:
    these are the illustrious toys you have left me.
 I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find
    them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and
    to the few stray stars of the dawn.
 Your dark rich life ...
 I must get at you, somehow; I put away those
    illustrious toys you have left me, I want your
    hidden look, your real smile -- that lonely,
    mocking smile your cool mirror knows.

II

 What can I hold you with?
 I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
    moon of the jagged suburbs.
 I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
    long and long at the lonely moon.
 I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
    that living men have honoured in bronze:
    my father's father killed in the frontier of
    Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
    bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
    the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
    --just twentyfour-- heading a charge of
    three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
    vanished horses.
 I offer you whatever insight my books may hold,
    whatever manliness or humour my life.
 I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
    been loyal.
 I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
    somehow --the central heart that deals not
    in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
    untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
 I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
    sunset, years before you were born.
 I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
    yourself, authentic and surprising news of
    yourself.
 I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
    hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
    with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.


   Jorge Luis Borges (Two English Poems)