El Jardin Botanico in the Palermo Neighborhood of Buenos Aires

Since I wrote about Buenos Aires being one of my favorite cities yesterday, I thought I would present a sonnet by Jorge Luis Borges, the poet of Buenos Aires, translated by Stephen Kessler from his collection of Borges’s sonnets:

Buenos Aires

Before, I looked for you within your limits
bounded by the sunset and the plain
and i the fenced yards holding an old-time
coolness of jasmine and of cedar shade.
In the memory of Palermo you were there,
in its mythology of a lost past
of cards and daggers and in the golden
bronze weight of the useless door knockers
with their hands and rings. I felt a sense of you
in the Southside patios and in the lengthening
shadows that ever so slowly obscured
their long right angles as the sun went down.
You are inside me now. You are my blurred
fate, all those things death will obliterate.