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

On acquiring an encyclopedia

Here the vast Brockhaus encyclopedia,
here the many loaded volumes and the atlas volume,
here the devotion of Germany,
here the neo-Platonists and the Gnostics,
here the first Adam and Adam of Bremen,
here the tiger and the Tartar,
here the scrupulous typography and the blue of oceans,
here the memory of time and the labyrinths of time,
here error and truth,
here the dilated miscellany which knows more than any man,
here the sum of long vigil.
Here also eyes that are useless, hands that miss, illegible
pages,
the doubtful shade of blindness, walls that recede.
But also here a new custom,
of that old custom, the house,
a gravitation and a presence,
the mysterious love of things
that do not know us or each other.