It’s sunny outside. It’s only a sun Yet men look at it and sing. I don’t know about the sun. I know about the melody of angels and the heated sermon of the last wind. I know how to scream until dawn when death settles naked on my shadow. I cry beneath my name. I… Continue reading Alejandra Pizarnik
In Praise of Darkness Old age (the name that others give it) can be the time of our greatest bliss. The animal has died or almost died. The man and his spirit remain. I live among vague, luminous shapes that are not darkness yet. Buenos Aires, whose edges disintegrated into the endless plain, has gone… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music. — Jorge Luis Borges
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
I’m not sure what poetry is, although I’m good at finding it anywhere: in a conversation, in the lyrics of a tango, in books of metaphysics, in sayings, and even in some poems. — Jorge Luis Borges
your voicein this inability to escapemy gazethings rid themselves of meif it isn’t your voiceturn me into a boat on a river of stonesa rain isolated in my fevered silenceyou undo my eyesand I askyou pleaseto speak to meforever —Alejandra Pizarnik, from “Presence,” Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 – 1972. (New Directions Publishing… Continue reading Alejandra Pizarnik
On an instant that today stands out alone,Without before or after, against oblivion,And has the taste of everything lost,Everything lost and recovered. There is nostalgia in every chord: — Jorge Luis Borges, from “The Tango,” A Personal Anthology (Grove Press, 1967)
