...
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 neverbeen 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.
- Jorges Luis Borges (1934)
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 neverbeen 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.
- Jorges Luis Borges (1934)
