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

The cipher

The moon's silent friendship
(I cite Virgil badly) accompanies you
since the now lost in time
night or dusk when your vague
eyes deciphered it forever
in a garden or yard that are dust.
Forever? I know that someone, one day,
may tell you in all truthfulness:
"You never will see the bright moon again.
Now you have exhausted the unalterable
sum of times destiny allotted.
Useless to open every window
in the world. It's late. You never will find it."
We live discovering and forgetting
that sweet custom of night.
You must look at it well. It could be final.