What can I hold you with?

2024


What can I hold you with is a wooden installation which is adapted from the poem by Borges. Each page illustrates one verse of the poem. I experimented with incorporating woodcarving and collage with illustration.


What can I hold you with?

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 bronze.

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.






©2026 Xuanchi Zhang