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

A thirteenth-century poet

Let us regard the arduous drafts
Of that first innominate sonnet,
The arbitrary page on which are blent
Tercets and quatrains peccant.

Slowly polishing his rigors
He pauses. Perhaps he hears
Coming from the future's holy dread
A remote rumor of nightingales.

Did he feel himself unalone,
That arcane, incredible Apollo
Had revealed an archetype to him,

An arid cystal that would catch
Whatsoever night closes or day opes:
Dædalus, labyrinth, enigma, Oedipus?