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

Menaced

Love. I'll have to get me gone or hide.
Prison grows like a bad dream. Another mask, but the one
and only. What good are talismans: letters, erudition,
toiling at Northern words that sing of the sea and
swordplay, friendship, Library galleries, ordinary things,
habits, young love for my mother, the military shadow of
my dead, timeless night, sleep and dream?
You or not you is how I measure time.
The jug breaks on the spring, birdcalls awaken, no-one looks
through windows, it's dark but unquiet.
I know, love: just to hear your voice, hope and memory, time.
With its mythologies, useless magic.
There is a corner I can't go to.
Armies ring me, hordes.
(Unreal room; unseen by her.)
A woman's name gives me away.
A woman pains me everywhere.