The Blue Borges

THE BLUE BORGES

   Pessadilla, Ephialtes, Incubus, Alp,
   Black Horse, a blind man cannot see
   the night. I dream the moon
   and I dream my eyes perceiving
   the moon. When I dream of Buenos Aires,
   my father is talking up and talking down
   the genius of Gustav Spiller
   with coffee and a cockatoo. Scharlach
   was the name of a German schoolgirl
   and Escarlata was the name of her twin
   in Madrid. Macedonio Fernandez,
   Alfonso Reyes, Maria Kodama, Rafael
   Cansinos-Assens, Don Nicano Paredes,
   the caudillo of Palermo--El amor
   o el diailogo de unos pocos. I wanted to lie down
   with each of them and run with each of them
   in a fresh meadow the way a river lies down
   and runs in a meadow. I wanted to be shelter
   and fire like that builder of the Great Wall
   and burner of all the books written before him,
   the first Emperor, Shih Haung Ti,
   who outlawed all the words for death
   and paid his sorcerers good money
   to invent the elixir of unlimited health;
   the screwball Shi Haung Ti,
   who called himself the first Haung Ti
   so as to be in some way the original
   Haung Ti as he wandered a palace
   that contained as many rooms as there are days
   in the year. Decay loves the ramparts,
   the stairwells, the terraces, the parapets,
   the galleries, the patios, the cloisters,
   the cisterns, the chambers, the anterooms,
   the dungeons, the vaults. Decay loves the cells.
   Decay loves the inscriptions. Decay loves
   decay and neither I nor the executioners
   of the State can do anything against this love
   because it is a love that does not decay.
   "Alles Nahe werde fern," said Goethe,
   but it is also true that everything distant
   becomes near. The Intellectual Voyage
   of Paul Groussac; the beloved blue
   Boethius who worked the toll booth
   between Free Will and Providence;
   An Experiment with Time by Dunne;
   Dante waits with Virgil in my father's study.
   A line by Verlaine that I have forgotten;
   Guatemala, Serrano, Paraguay, Gurruchaga;
   Juan Diaz de Solis who rowed upstream
   in 1516 to be consumed by Indians;
   Hipolito lrigoyen, the twice elected,
   couped Argentinean president; terraqueous
   daguerreotypes wait in that circular room
   with walls and doors that were mirrors.
   I remember the phony infinitude of the self.
   I worship the dream of the yellow tiger
   which can only be hunted by men
   riding the back of a Persian elephant.
   Pessadilla, Ephialtes, Incubus, Alp,
   Black Horse, I want to lie down in darkness
   and dream of the fresh meadows
   that have vanished, and the rivers
   that have also vanished. I long as Spinoza said
   all things long in their being to persist.

TERRANCE HAYES's second book, Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), was a National Poetry Series Open Competition. His debut collection, Muscular Music, received a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He currently teaches at Carnegie-Mellon University.

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