2.19.2023

[I presumed to approach Borges]

I presumed to approach Borges one evening
for an interview. He’d just given a talk,
and my master’s thesis had explored his work.
 
Five years before, I’d interviewed Jane Fonda.
She was downright cranky after her arrest
at the Cleveland airport on suspicion of 
vitamin trafficking. But Borges was kind.
 
His fine hands fluttered like white Barbary doves
as he spoke in a confidential murmur,
now in English, now in Spanish. What he said,
he said to all the girls who accosted him.

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NOTE: A large number of people can legitimately lay claim to the phrase “my interview with Jorge Luis Borges.” The man was generous. He also saw you coming, and he had constructed a seamless interview persona that was more than equal to what you regarded as your uniquely penetrating questions and provocations. I no longer have a copy of my own published interview with the great Argentine writer. It appeared in an alternative newsweekly whose name escapes me, though I dimly recall that the offices were in the bourgeois-bohemian Mount Adams neighborhood of Cincinnati. But I do still have my interview notes. As for Jane Fonda, the following link points to the details of her arrest at Cleveland Hopkins Airport: “Hanoi Jane” busted, 3 November 1970