what can i hold you with?

all i wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house - e. hopper

i offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs.
i offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
i offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in marble: my father's father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather -just twentyfour- heading a charge of three hundred men in Perú, now ghosts on vanished horses.

i offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my life.
i offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
i offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved somehow -the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
i offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.

i offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself. i can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; i am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.