Mythic streets evaporate at dawn,
leaving only complacent memory
to recall imperfectly those scraps
and oddities of ephemera that
defy rational explanation;
a pristine franked letter posted
in Huddersfield 1841;several ornate
glass marbles that were a birthday
present to some Rhineland princeling;
the signature of Thomas Alva Edison
on a page awkwardly torn from a
Hotel register omitting its name,
the building itself demolished long ago;
a skeletal frame of a Penny Farthing
half buried amid the inconsequential
detritus of the communal refuse tip;
a yellowing poster of a once well known
brand of cough syrup,the discernible lines
of a now defunct city tram route;
And somewhere,the presence of an
inveterate aesthete and poet of civic
renown struggling to evoke a nostalgia
amongst those who had not read Borges
nor knew of his blindness.