Oh days devoted to the useless burden <br />of putting out of mind the biography <br />of a minor poet of the Southem Hemisphere, <br />to whom the fates or perhaps the stars have given <br />a body which will leave behind no child, <br />and blindness, which is semi-darkness and jail, <br />and old age, which is the dawn of death, <br />and fame, which absolutely nobody deserves, <br />and the practice of weaving hendecasyllables, <br />and an old love of encyclopedias <br />and fine handmade maps and smooth ivory, <br />and an incurable nostalgia for the Latin, <br />and bits of memories of Edinburgh and Geneva <br />and the loss of memory of names and dates, <br />and the cult of the East, which the varied peoples <br />of the teeming East do not themselves share, <br />and evening trembling with hope or expectation, <br />and the disease of entymology, <br />and the iron of Anglo-Saxon syllables, <br />and the moon, that always catches us by surprise, <br />and that worse of all bad habits, Buenos Aires, <br />and the subtle flavor of water, the taste of grapes, <br />and chocolate, oh Mexican delicacy, <br />and a few coins and an old hourglass, <br />and that an evening, like so many others, <br />be given over to these lines of verse.<br /><br />Jorge Luis Borges<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/that-one/
