Duende
The gray-scale photograph shows it––we were there, high
as matadors perched upon horseback, hurling, swaying
incongruently to a Babylon Bull’s stone-solid shoulders.
His wounds hissing and biting. Pythia cried, leaking
a shining, white sap:
“Who are we? What was to be? Enter now, and
remember, O man, that you are the bold matador
approaching the speaker’s pall, eyes full of duende;
dust, and unto dust you shall return.”
Asked permission to slay the bull. Night approaches.
The patient figure, shrouded, is “Denied.”
Echoed by his ruffled cloth; ripped, wet, and once she
softly dismounts, stained with piss. As if smell were a mark:
the cutting, direct hand prepared the bull
for death. The cloth is dry, after seven weeks. I stood,
arms heavy, fully nude as the bull charges.
He pauses, panting and bare-assed, asks “Who is
the crimson wave of carnations thrown to her feet?”
“You?” paused, offering, “we?”