main | Vacant room | Dawning | Butcher shop | Simplicity | Farewell | Dulcia Linquimus Arva | Last sun in Villa Ortúzar | Mythical founding of Buenos Aires | Deathwatch on the Southside | Buenos Aires Deaths | Chess | Quatrain | Cyclical Night | A thirteenth-century poet | Susana Soca | Camden, 1892 | A Northside knife | Milonga of Albornoz | New England, 1967 | The labyrinth | Invocation to Joyce | Tankas | Susana Bombal | Things | Menaced | You | Poem of quantity | The sentinel | To the German language | 1891 | Hengist asks for men, A.D. 449 | Browning poet resolves to be | Suicide | I am | Fifteen coins | Blind man | 1972 | Elegy | The exile (1977) | In memory of Angelica | My books | Talismans | The white deer | The profound rose | Mexico | Herman Melville | To Johannes Brahms | Baruch Spinoza | Alhambra | Music box | Adam is your ashes | On acquiring an encyclopedia | Nostalgia for the present | The accomplice | Shinto | The cipher | My last tiger | The cypress leaves | The weft

Mexico

How many things alike! The rider and the plain,
The tradition of swords, silver and mahogany,
The pious benzoin scenting the alcove
And this Latin come to less, Spanish.
How many things distinct! A mythology
Of blood the deep dark gods interknit,
The nopal that gives the desert horror
And the love of a shade anterior to day.
How many things eternal! The yard that fills
With slow slight moonlight no-one sees, the faded
Violet betwixt forgotten Nájera's pages,
The shock of waves returning to the sand.
The man who settles into his last bed
To wait for death. He wants to have it, all.