Jorge Luis B.

I

The useless dawn finds me in a deserted streetcorner; I have outlived the night.

Nights are proud waves: darkblue topheavy waves laden with all

       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 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 stars dogs and 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 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 grandfather -just twenty four- heading a charged 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 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.