Lorca leans into the bullring's skybox,
freshly painted red and green
like blood and grass beneath the Iberian sun,
where poetry composts into compositions
fit for a toreador, whose tights hug his thin hips,
tempting the huffing beast to hook his groin.
Spain's family jewels bulge behind the tattered
red cape, the one tool of the trade that can't
**** the bull, only blindly enrage it to charge
for its pride, its race, for the red light of glory,
as royalty wave their embroidered handkerchiefs,
awaiting the bull's ****** ear, still warm and steamy,
after so many twirls around the packed-sand dance floor.
Each step kicks up a black faux pas, first lunge
along the fatalistic journey to mortality: a pale thigh gored,
an artery gushes. Gangrene seeps in, drenched
in brandy, which disinfects only the guzzler's gullet.
No antidote to sepsis, no darning of the tights.
The toreador dies to fight another day, his banderillos
still stuck in the **** of muscularity, his eyes darting
among the crowds for a sign of good fortune, good
hunting, as in the old days of machismo and torture
and blind lust for the blood of brutes who threatened
no one but the cowardly prince on horseback, wobbly
beneath the weight of his armor. His ardor as fabricated
as his divine right to rule over the beasts of the field,
over the beaten-down brows of his subjects, toothlessly
grinning at the hope of dining on sacrifice, something
the truly chosen people could do only on the pain of death.
Lorca mourns the dying fighter with the duende of
flamenco, the wild, passionate cry of suffering, the blackest
black of Spain, the urge to create and destroy, to undress
the poet's soul, as naked as a newborn, as powerful as
a raging bull, charging without thinking, divining the forces
of nature like a hurricane, an earthquake. To shout down
death is to immortalize art, as long as human history endures.
