Jorge Luis Borges: Poems

Ultimo resplandor

Siempre es conmovedor el ocaso
por charro o indigente que sea,
pero más conmovedor todavía
es aquel brillo desesperado y final
cuya herrumbre avejenta la llanura
cuando en el horizonte nada recuerda
la vanagloria del poniente.
Nos duele sostener esa luz tirante y distinta,
esa luz tan sin causa
que es una alucinación que impone al espacio
el unánime miedo de la sombra
y que cesa de golpe
cuando notamos su falsía,
como se desbarata un sueño
cuando el soñador percibe que duerme.
Last Shining

The sunset is always moving,
rustic or indigent though it may be,
yet more moving still
is that final desperate light
whose rusty colors age the land
when the horizon recalls nothing
of the vainglorious setting sun.
It pains us to sustain that tense and distant light,
that light so without meaning
that it is an illusion imposed on space
by our unanimous fear of darkness,
that light that ends suddenly
when we realize its falsehood,
just as a dream falls apart
when the dreamer realizes he is sleeping.

Two English poems

I.
The useless dawn finds me in a deserted streetcorner; I have outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves: darkblue topheavy waves laden with all hues of deep spoil, laden with things unlikely and desirable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals, of things half given away, half witheld, of joys with a dark hemisphere.
The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds and odd ends: some hated friends to chat with. music for dreams, and the smoking of bitter ashes. The things my hungry heart has no use for.
The big wave brought you.
Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily and incessantly beautiful. We talked and you have forgotten the words.
The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street of my city.
Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to make your name, the lilt of your laughter: these are the illustious toys you have left me.
I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and to the few stray stars of the dawn.
Your dark rich life.
I must get at you, somehow: I put away those illustious toys you have left me, I want your hidden look, your real smile -that lonely, mocking smile you cool mirror knows.

II.
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 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 Perú, 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.