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 Northside knife
There along the Maldonado
That's hidden now and blind,
There in the grizzled slum
Poor Carriego sang,
Behind a door ajar
That gives on yard and vine,
Where night heard
The guitar's love,
Will be a box and at the bottom
Will be sleeping with hard shine
Among those things that time
Knows how to forget, a knife.
It was that Saverio Suárez's,
Better known as el Chileno,
Who in gambling halls and elections
Always proved himself the good one.
Boys, who are the devil
Will look for it with stealth
And try with a fingertip
To see if its edge is nicked.
How many times it entered
The flesh of a Christian
And now it's put away alone,
Waiting for a hand,
That's dust. Behind the glass
A yellow sun gilds,
Across years and houses,
I'm looking at you, knife.