Jorge Luis Borges

What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets,
the moon of the ragged 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 ghost that living men have honoured in marble:
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 twentyfour-
heading a charge of three hundred men in Perú,
now ghosts on vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold,
whatever manliness humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
I offer her 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.