Pessadilla, Ephialtes, Incubus, Alp,
Black Horse, a blind man cannot see
the night. I dream the moon
and I dream my eyes perceiving
the moon. When I dream of Buenos Aires,
my father is talking up and talking down
the genius of Gustav Spiller
with coffee and a cockatoo. Scharlach
was the name of a German schoolgirl
and Escarlata the name of her twin
in Madrid. Macedonio Fernandez,
Alfonso Reyes, Maria Kodama, Rafael
Cansinos-Assens, Don Nicano Paredes,
the caudillo of Palermo—El amor
o el diálogo de unos pocos. I wanted to lie down
with each of them and run with each of them
in a fresh meadow the way a river lies down
and runs in a meadow. I wanted to be shelter
and fire like that builder of the Great Wall
and burner of all the books written before him,
the first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti,
who outlawed all the words for death
and paid his sorcerers good money
to invent the elixir of unlimited health;
the screwball Shih Huang Ti,
who called himself the first Huang Ti
so as to be in some way the original
Huang Ti as he wandered a palace
that contained as many rooms as there are days
in the year. Decay loves the ramparts,
the stairwells, the terraces, the parapets,
the galleries, the patios, the cloisters,
the cisterns, the chambers, the anterooms,

the dungeons, the vaults. Decay loves the cells.
Decay loves the inscriptions. Decay loves
decay and neither I nor the executioners
of the State can do anything against this love
because it is a love that does not decay.
“Alles Nahe werde fern,” said Goethe,
but it is also true that everything distant
becomes near. The Intellectual Voyage
of Paul Groussac; the beloved blue
Boethius who worked the toll booth
between Free Will and Providence;
An Experiment with Time by Dunne;
Dante waits with Virgil in my father’s study.
A line by Verlaine that I have forgotten;
Guatemala, Serrano, Paraguay, Gurruchaga;
Juan Diaz de Solis who rowed upstream
in 1516 to be consumed by Indians;
Hipolito Irigoyen, the twice elected,
couped Argentinean president; terraqueous
daguerreotypes wait in that circular room
with walls and doors that are mirrors.
I remember the phony infinitude of the self.
I worship the dream of the yellow tiger
which can only be hunted by men
riding the back of a Persian elephant.
Pessadilla, Ephialtes, Incubus, Alp,
Black Horse, I want to lie down in darkness
and dream of the fresh meadows
that have vanished, and the rivers
that have also vanished. I long as Spinoza said
all things long in their being to persist.

THE BLUE BOWIE

THE BLUE BOWIE