Selected Poems

The Suicide Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.

Let not the rash marble risk garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence, in many words recalling name, renown, events, birthplace. All those glass jewels are best left in the dark. Let not the marble say what men do not. The essentials of the dead man's life-- the trembling hope, the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight-- will abide forever. Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue when it is the lives of others that will make that happen, as you yourself are the mirror and image of those who did not live as long as you and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth.

God has created nights well-populated with dreams, crowded with mirror images, so that man may feel that he is nothing more than vain reflection. That's what frightens us.

Three hundred nights like three hundred walls must rise between my love and me and the sea will be a black art between us. Time with a hard hand will tear out the streets tangled in my breast. Nothing will be left but memories. (O afternoons earned with suffering, nights hoping for the sight of you, dejected vacant lots, poor sky shamed in the bottom of the puddles like a fallen angel. . . . And your life that graces my desire and that run-down and lighthearted neighborhood shining today in the glow of my love. . . .) Final as a statue your absence will sadden other fields.

The Moon" There is such loneliness in that gold. The moon of the nights is not the moon Who the first Adam saw. The long centuries Of human vigil have filled her With ancient lament. Look at her. She is your mirror.

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 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 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. from “Two English Poems

Equivocamos esa paz con la muerte y creemos anhelar nuestro fin y anhelamos el sueno y la indiferencia. (We mistake peace for death and we believe we long for our end when what we long for is sleep and indifference.)

Afterglow" Sunset is always disturbing whether theatrical or muted, but still more disturbing is that last desperate glow that turns the plain to rust when on the horizon nothing is left of the pomp and clamor of the setting sun. How hard holding on to that light, so tautly drawn and different, that hallucination which the human fear of the dark imposes on space and which ceases at once the moment we realize its falsity, the way a dream is broken the moment the sleeper knows he is dreaming.

Today is tomorrow and yesterday.

Happy is he who forgives others and who forgives himself.

I am this groping intensity that is a soul.

What is past is what is real.

Matthew XV:30” The first bridge, Constitution Station. At my feet the shunting trains trace iron labyrinths. Steam hisses up and up into the night, which becomes at a stroke the night of the Last Judgment. From the unseen horizon and from the very center of my being, an infinite voice pronounced these things— things, not words. This is my feeble translation, time-bound, of what was a single limitless Word: “Stars, bread, libraries of East and West, playing-cards, chessboards, galleries, skylights, cellars, a human body to walk with on the earth, fingernails, growing at nighttime and in death, shadows for forgetting, mirrors busily multiplying, cascades in music, gentlest of all time's shapes. Borders of Brazil, Uruguay, horses and mornings, a bronze weight, a copy of the Grettir Saga, algebra and fire, the charge at Junín in your blood, days more crowded than Balzac, scent of the honeysuckle, love and the imminence of love and intolerable remembering, dreams like buried treasure, generous luck, and memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy— all this was given to you, and with it the ancient nourishment of heroes— treachery, defeat, humiliation. In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.

...I Fear the mirror may disclose The true, unvarnished visage of my soul, Bruised by shadows, black and blue with guilt- The face God sees, that men perhaps see too.

Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one. ― Jorge Luis Borges, “The Suicide,” Selected Poems. (Penguin Books; Reprint edition, April 1, 2000) Originally published October 1st 1971.

I kept getting close to happiness and have stood in the shadow of suffering.

But the days are a web of small troubles, And is there a greater blessing Than to be the ash of which oblivion is made? Pero los dias son una red de triviales miserias, y habra suerte mejor que la ceniza de que esat hecho el ovido?

Vivimos descubriendo y olvidando esa dulce costumbre de la noche. Hay que mirarla bien. Puede ser última. (Our life is spent discovering and forgetting that gentle habit of the night. Take a good look. It could be the last.)

Un idioma es una tradición, un modo de sentir la realidad, no un arbitrario repertorio de símbolos. (A language is a tradition, a way of grasping reality, not an arbitrary assemblage of symbols.)

A veces en las tardes una cara Nos mira desde el fondo de un espejo; El arte debe ser como ese espejo Que nos revela nuestra propia cara. (At times in the evenings a face Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror; Art should be like that mirror Which reveals to us our own face.)

ELEGIJA O NEMOGUĆOJ USPOMENI Šta ne bih dao za sećanje na prašnjav puteljak sa niskim ogradama i visokog konjanika što zoru ispunjava (pohaban dugački pončo) jednog dana među danima ravnice, jednog dana bez datuma. Šta ne bih dao za sećanje na majku koja posmatra jutro na estansiji Svete Irene a ne zna da će se zvati Borhes. Šta ne bih dao za sećanje da sam se borio kod Sepede i video Estanislaa Del Kampa kako pozdravlja prvi kuršum s radošću hrabra čoveka. Šta ne bih dao za sećanje na kapiju skrivenog letnjikovca koju je moj otac svake večeri zatvarao pre no što bi se izgubio u snu i koju je zatvorio poslednji put četrnaestog februara 38. Šta ne bih dao za sećanje na Hengistove čunove koji kreću sa peščanih obala Danske da osvoje ostrvo koje još Engleska ne beše. Šta ne bih dao za sećanje (imao sam ga i izgubio) na jedno zlatasto Tarnerovo platno široko kao muzika. Šta ne bih dao za sećanje da sam čuo Sokrata kad je pred veče kukute s vedrinom ispitivao problem besmrtnosti, naizmenično navodeći mitove i razloge dok se plava smrt penjala iz već studenih nogu. Šta ne bih dao za sećanje da si mi rekla da me voliš i da nisam spavao do zore, bestidan i srećan.

That I might be allowed to dream the other Whose fertile memory will be a part Of all the days of man, I humbly pray; My god, my dreamer, keep on dreaming me

There is a line by Verlaine that I will not remember again. There is a street nearby that is off limits to my feet. There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time. There is a door I have closed until the end of the world. Among the books in my library (I’m looking at them now) are some I will never open. This summer I will be fifty years old. Death is using me up, relentlessly.

But again the world has been spared. Light roams the streets inventing dirty colours And with a certain remorse For my complicity in the day’s rebirth I ask my house to exist

But again the world has been spared. Light romans the streets inventing dirty colours And with a certain remorse For my complicity in the day’s rebirth I ask my house to exist

I think of things that weren't, but might have been. The treatise on Saxon myths Bede never wrote. The inconceivable work Dante might have had a glimpse of, As soon as he’d corrected the Comedy’s last verse. History without the afternoons of the Cross and the hemlock. History without the face of Helen. Man without the eyes that gave us the moon. On Gettysburg’s three days, victory for the South. The love we never shared. The wide empire the Vikings chose not to found. The world without the wheel or the rose. The view John Donne held of Shakespeare. The other horn of the Unicorn. The fabled Irish bird that lights on two trees at once. The child I never had.

The pettiest will be generous And the most craven will be brave: Nothing improves a reputation Like confinement to a grave.

Europe was lost, but there were other scions: The dream bequeathed a grand inheritance To people of the Orient's arid lands And those who share the sultry night with lions.

The Labyrinth Zeus himself could not undo the web of stone closing around me, I have forgotten the men I was before; I follow the hated path of monotonous walls that is my destiny. Severe galleries which curve in secret circles to the end of the years. Parapets cracked by the day’s usury. In the pale dust I have discerned signs that frighten me. In the concave evenings the air has carries a roar toward me, or the echo of a desolate howl. I know there is an Other in the shadows, whose fate it is to wear out the long solitudes which weave and unweave this Hades and to long for my blood and devour my death. Each of us seeks the other. If only this were the final day of waiting. - S.K.

El concepto de arte comprometido es una ingenuidad porque nadie sabe del todo lo que ejecuta. (The notion of art as a compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what they are doing.)