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TWO ENGLISH POEMS II

by Jorge Luis Borges

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 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 

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.