from Blackwater Quartet, selection 19

Three Descriptions of the Colour Red

Between baptism and the Outer Darkness,
an impoverishment of time and species
commits to memory
the names of angels in their atomic solitude.

Jorge Luis Borges, blind in Buenos Aires,
considers the eternity of archetypes,
the scavenger model
of the fundamental earth.

He rolls the moonlight in his mouth,
recalling childhood scenes — the gramophone,
its honeysuckle arias and melting hearts,
and beyond the parlour, outside, relentless sun,
raw pampas and, through the dust,
gauchos butchering meat.

The universe is nostalgia, for the comforts of geometry
in the portals of the poorest houses, for each lost second
sunk past red horizons.

The names drift past the fig trees of Buenos Aires,
and the skeletons beneath streetlamps,
and the smallness of the nightingale, across the sea of glass
to Patmos, comprehending alpha and omega,
the scarlet beast, and fierce birds
devouring the flesh of captains.