Borges's New England

Been reading In Praise of Darkness, a book containing Borges's poems and short prose works...and two with New England themes caught my eye...

Cambridge

Morning and New England
I turn down Craigie
and think (what I have thought before)
that this name Craigie is Scots
and that crag, the word is of Celtic origin.
I think (what I have thought before)
that this winter holds in it all winters past,
back to the elders who wrote
that our way is marked out,
that way we already belong to Love or to fire.
The snow and the morning and these walls of red brick
perhaps are forms of happiness,
but I come from other places,
where colors are soft and gray
and where a woman, when evening falls,
will water the plants in the patio.
I lift my eyes and lose them in the fathomless blue.
Farther on are the elms by Longfellow's house
and the ceaseless sleepy river.

...

New England 1967

The shapes inhabiting my dreams have changed.
Now they are red houses, in from the street,
the delicate bronze of the foliage,
a chaste winter, and merciful wood fires.
The earth, as on the seventh day, is good.
Something that does not quite exist lives on,
old and sad, in the dying afternoons--
ancient rumor of Bible and battle.
Any day now (we are told) snow will come
and out on every street America
awaits me, but as evening falls I feel
today so slow and yesterday so brief.
Buenos Aires, yours are the streets that I
go on walking without a why or when.



While the descriptions of red houses, red brick walls, the delicate foliage is very Cambridge-y, one cannot help but smiling at the snow-anxiety that ["Any day now (we are told) snow will come"] even a visitor to New England seems to gets infected by...