The Floating Library

At fifty generations’ end (And such abysses time affords us all) I return to the further shore of a great river That the vikings’ dragons did not reach, To the harsh and arduous words That, with a mouth now turned to dust, I used in my Northumbrian, Mercian days Before I became a Haslam or [...]

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Sheer accident or the secret laws That rule this dream, my destiny, Will — O needed and sweet homeland That not without glory and without shame embrace A hundred and fifty arduous years – That I, the drop, should speak with you, the river, That I, the instant, speak with you, who are time, And [...]

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Vague chance or the precise laws That govern this dream, the universe, Granted me to share a smooth Stretch of the course with Alfonso Reyes. He knew well that art which no one Wholly knows, neither Sinbad nor Ulysses, Which is to pass  from one land on to others And yet to be entirely in [...]

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History tells us how in that past time When all things happened, real, Imaginary, and dubious, a man Conceived the unconscionable plan Of making an abridgment of the universe In a single book and with infinite zest He towered his screed up, lofty and Strenuous, polished it, spoke the final verse. About to offer his [...]

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I, who felt the horrors of mirrors Not only in front of the impenetrable crystal Where there ends and begins, uninhabitable, An impossible space of reflections, But of gazing even on water that mimics The other blue in its depth of sky, That at times gleams back the illusory flight Of the inverted bird, or [...]

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The wheeling of the stars is not infinite And the tiger is one of the forms that return, But we, remote from chance of hazard, Believed we were exiled in a time outworn, Time when nothing can happen. The universe, the tragic universe, was not here And maybe should be looked for somewhere else; I [...]

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Without lament or anger time will nick The most heroic swords. Poor and in sorrow, You came home to a land turned from tomorrow, O captain, came to die within her, sick, And with her. In the magic desert-wastes The flower of Portugal was lost and died, And the harsh Spaniard, hitherto subdued, Was menacing [...]

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I know little — or nothing — of my own forebears; The Borges back in Portugal; vague folk That in my flesh, obscurely, still evoke Their customs, and their firmnesses and fears. As slight as if they’d never lived in the sun And free from any trafficking with art, They form an indecipherable part Of [...]

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I leave him on his horse, and in the gray And twilit hour he fixed with death for a meeting; Of all the hours that shaped his human day May this last long, though bitter and defeating. The whiteness of his horse and poncho over The plain advances. Setting sights again To the hollow rifles [...]

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Nothing. Only Muraña’s knife. Only in the gray afternoon the story cut short. I don’t know why in the afternoons I’m companioned By this assassin that I’ve never seen. Palermo was further down. The yellow Thick wall of the jail dominated Suburb and mud flat. Through this savage District went the sordid knife. The knife. [...]

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You walk the Castile countryside As if you hardly saw that it was there. A tricky verse of John’s your only care, You scarcely notice that the sun has died In a yellow glow. The light diffuses, trembles, And on the borders of the East there spreads That moon of mockery which most resembles The [...]

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