What can I hold you with?
Jorge Luis Borges

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 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 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 explanationsof 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.