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
Talismans
A copy of the first
edition of the Edda Islandorum of Snorri,
printed in Denmark.
The five volumes of Schopenhauer's œuvre.
The two volumes of Chapman's Odyssey.
A sword that waged war—the desert.
A maté gourd with serpent feet my great-grandfather brought
from Lima.
A crystal prism.
Some smudgy daguerreotypes.
A terraqueous wooden globe which Cecilia Ingenieros gave
me and was her
father's.
A cane with a curved handle I walked through the American
plains, through
Colombia and Texas.
Various metal cylinders with diplomas.
The cap and gown of a doctorate.
Enterprises by Saavedra Fajardo, in odorous Spanish board.
The memory of a morning.
Lines of Virgil and Frost.
The voice of Macedonio Fernández.
The love or dialogue of a few.
Certainly they are talismans, but of no use against the
darkness that I
cannot name, against the darkness that I
must not name.