En las Calles de Borges
Between street corners you held his breath
in two black notebooks, a confluence of amble and collide.
In one example you are seated on a park bench in Plaza San Martín.
Who did you imagine would enter by cart and who by horseback?
Never mind that the voice over the phone repeats that your number
is theoretically impossible. Or that Borges’ map of the city is based on a forged original.
A companion was needed, a summary of atrium and courtyard.
The soffited eye dreams the circumference of a stranger’s glance.
That the phone continues to ring inside a cabinet
is the receiver’s unkept secret. Now there are two hemispheres to consider.
Could you, Borges asks, have invented the words for mullion and transom?
Could you stand in their shadows just a moment longer?