Below you’ll find a poem evocative of both Argentina (Borges’ beloved city) and of literature.

Enjoy.

Rain in Buenos Aires

By Jasmine Bailey

These are not the first clouds you’ve seen,
or the first time you’ve smelled the rain,
which you can never be certain of,
like the scent of sex, which sometimes you intuit
rather than perceive, since you’ve been here,
but now, as you stand in front of your plane
waiting to mount its folding staircase to somewhere else,
this plane that was two hours late,
that you would not have chosen,
a trip of someone else’s invention,
it rains in Buenos Aires, where the air is so good.

For you there is peace but no happiness in the loft apartment
speckled with borrowed kitchen things, a thick pot,
two plastic teacups, flatware in a purple pitcher,
the mismatched beds with the single roseate blanket.
The view of the schoolyard, the good light and wood
ceilings you know are charming, go nowhere like
your uncle wandering back and forth from the racetracks
to Florida for forty years and as many more as it takes
to die or get better. Each win furnishing a hamburger,
a quart of beer, a trifecta or two more chances. Each loss
falling into time like losing tickets between the bleachers.

Every time you put on your shoes you step into loneliness,
to be alone is a relief, drink a coffee on the corner,
try to make out the graffiti angel across from Teatro Colon
or go to the tall standing cemetery in Recoleta
where the dead go to gossip forever, you can imagine
their soirees, everyone wearing marble or granite,
with hairdos that never collapse, sneering at tourists.
And do the cats slumbering on the tombs, and weaving
through the iron gates like small priests die too?
Where can you lay them to rest, who slept through life
carelessly over a thousand tombs, and would death
improve the impeccable rest a cat feels each time it blinks?

Borges, who thought so much about immortality, was comforted
to think that we all die. He looked forward to the great release,
like Jesus, awaiting the fulfillment of God’s only promise.
He ran his fingers over the husks of the old German volumes
in the depths of the National Library, where he negotiated
the currents of concepts like a squid, formless and infinitely
deft, buying books long after his eyesight was gone
because there is a pleasure in buying books, a sensation
in their proximity, a vibration you can feel
in the most private quarters of the shelves,
the variable shapeliness of water, the cool distortion
of your own hand and wrist, the gentle manipulation of time.

When I was in the city I sometimes saw Borges
going to work on a bus, wearing a pink shirt,
or passing me on the street, his right hand extended
such a small degree ahead of him, avoiding children,
or I would pass a café where he was seated, drinking agua con gas,
I was never surprised, and I would say aloud, look at the shirt Borges’ wife
has chosen for him this morning! Who does he hope will win
the football game this Sunday? Does he love Palermo?

When people like us come to the Pampas to confront
the other versions of ourselves, to grow disoriented on meat
and get into fights, there can be no peace in the village.
We are always polluting the air currents with our dreams
of the city’s gray walls, the women walking to the opera,
the dogs curled around tree trunks, the loud man singing Milonga
by the café where we sat to write, alone with the universe,
naturally, deeply alone, among thirteen thousand people,
the common presentiments, the car horns, and the unexpected,
but always unexpected rain.