what can I hold you with

II

What can I hold you with?

I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of 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 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. 

Jorge Luis Borges, Two english poems II