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 twentyfour– heading a charge of
      three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
      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 of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
      with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.