The Tiger Bones of Borges

I remember him from the seventies.

We liked seeing the great blind writer 

of the Other Tiger, and The Circular Ruins,

that evening in a Texas auditorium.

I can still hear the sounds of Jorge Luis Borges’s

Spanish poems, just before he moved off stage slowly,

followed by the young fans with his poetry,

longing for the great South American’s autograph.

But he was eighty and could not stand long,

and he was blind with a cane.

I was behind him and whispered, ‘thank you,’

in his ear, touching the fabric that stretched 

over his bony shoulder.

As in his poem, The Other Tiger, his bones

held their ‘splendor beneath the quivering;’

and Borges nodded to me once in reply.

His body and mine then flowed apart,

leaving me with a memory of my hand

lightly brushing across the tiger bones

of the shoulder under his dress jacket.