Two English poems - Jorge Luis Borges

To Beatriz Biblioni Webster de Bullrich

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 hues of deep spoil, laden

with things unlikely and desurable.

Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and with-

held, 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 ragged 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 marble:

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 grand-

father - just twentyfour - heading a charge

of three hundred men in Perú, 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 your-

self.

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.

1934

BORGES, Jorge Luis. Selected Poems 1923 - 1967. England: Penguin books, 1985, p. 87-89.