VI (from Midsummer)

Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat's yawn,

Trees with dust on their lips, cars melting down

in its furnace. Heat staggers the drifting mongrels.

The capitol has been repainted rose, the rails

round Woodford Square the color of rusting blood.

Casa Rosada, the Argentinian mood,

croons from the balcony. Monotonous lurid bushes

brush the damp clouds with the ideograms of buzzards

over the Chinese groceries. The oven alleys stifle.

In Belmont, mournful tailors peer over old machines,

stitching June and July together seamlessly.

And one waits for midsummer lightning as the armed sentry

in boredom waits for the crack of a rifle.

But I feed on its dust, its ordinariness,

on the faith that fills its exiles with horror,

on the hills at dusk with their dusty orange lights,

even on the pilot light in the reeking harbour

that turns like a police car's. The terror

is local, at least. Like the magnolia's whorish whiff.

All night, the barks of a revolution crying wolf.

The moon shines like a lost button.

The yellow sodium lights on the wharf come on.

In streets, dishes clatter behind dim windows.

The night is companionable, the future as fierce as

tomorrow's sun everywhere. I can understand

Borges's blind love for Buenos Aires,

how a man feels the streets of a city swell in his hand.