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

Vacant room

The mahogany furniture perpetuates
amid brocade indecision
its regular klatsch.
Daguerreotypes
belie the nearness
of age cloistered in a mirror
and before our eyes slip away
like useless dates
of blurred anniversaries.
With sketchy gestures
the anxious near-voice
runs after our souls
with half a century of tardiness
and barely if it be now
in the mornings of our childhood.
Actuality constant
convincing and sanguineous
feasts in the street
its irrefutable plenitude
of present apotheosis
while the light
bores a hole in the glass
to humiliate senile armchairs
and corner and hang
the lank voice
of the ancestors.