Two English Poems
To Beatriz Bibiloni Webster de Bullrich
(II)
What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in bronze: my father’s father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow; my mother’s grandfather—just twenty four—heading a charge of three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow —the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
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兩首英文詩
獻給貝阿特麗斯 比維羅尼 韋伯斯特 德布爾裏奇
（之二）
我可以用什麽來留住你？
我獻給你逼仄的街道，令人沮喪的落日，以及在犬牙交錯的郊區升起的月。
我獻給你一個久望孤月的男人的酸楚。
我獻給你我的先祖們，我家族那些逝去的男子漢們，至今活著的人們仍舊在青銅雕像前緬懷的我的那些先祖們的魂靈：
我那犧牲在布宜諾斯艾利斯前線的祖父，兩顆子彈穿過他的肺，他留著胡須死去，被他的戰友們用一張牛皮包裹；
我的外祖父 — 年僅二十四歲，在秘魯統帥一支三百人的隊伍，如今他們的魂靈漂浮在無形的馬背上。
我獻給你我所有的書裏可能包含的任何洞見，還有我生命中任何的男子漢氣概或者幽默。
我獻給你一個男人從未獻出過的忠誠。
我獻給你我深藏的真心，一定程度上 — 此心無法用語言來表述，無法用夢想來傳述，它不曾被時間、歡樂和災難所沾染。
我獻給你在距你出生幾年前我看見夕陽下一朵黃玫瑰的記憶。
我獻給你我對你的解讀，有關你的理論，還有關於你的原汁原味的、驚喜的傳聞。
我可以給你我的孤獨，我的陰暗，以及我心靈的渴望；
我在試圖用不確定、危險和失敗來誘惑你。
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