[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Susan—

You convinced me. I thought about your suggestion and decided that I liked the two sólos serving as emphatic, absolute bookends for the poem, so I added them into L1 and L13.

The exact geometry involved in Borges’s description of traveling to the other side of the sunset is rather confusing. It reminded me of Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” where she and Death, in their carriage, chaperoned by Immortality, travel beyond the fields and children playing and finally “beyond the setting sun.” I concluded that “only once past the sunset” meant the same as being “on the other side of the sunset.” Both seem pretty clearly to be tropes for death.

Thanks for your help!

Glenn