What can I hold you with?

I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of
the jagged 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 ghosts that
living men have honoured in bronze: 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 twenty four-heading a charge of three hundred
men in Peru, now ghost in vanished horses.

I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever
Manliness or humour my life.

I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.

I offer you 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 f my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty,
with danger, with defeat.

J.L.B.