JOHN BURNSIDE

IN ARGENTINA

I Plaza San Martin (Tango)

This poem is from the 2005 collection THE GOOD NEIGHBOUR, published in the UK by Jonathan Cape.

It feels like the right poem for a new year, with all its possibilities and memories.

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I keep coming back
to the city I know from a dream:

no one at large on the streets
and the land all around me

haunted by winds
and the silt-coloured murmur

of gauchos.

By day, it is never like that:
there are buildings and people,

women with flames in their eyes
and a river of boys

who are hoping for something more
than manhood

- a tango, say,

a dance they can sift from the night
or a song in the blood

that others could see
in the slow work we make

of a lifetime.

The days are all guesswork and noise,
like the business of a home,

but now and again
for moments that don’t quite begin

a person can come to himself
on San Martin

-a person not quite
the person I might have been

and no more or less happy or true
than a stranger’s childhood

-come to himself at noon
as a waking dream

and matching the shadows he knows
with the shadows he finds

in the garnet and star-tinted blooms
of the palos borrachos.