Horns Forward
Gay Brewer
Notice the legs of the chair thrust upward
at the school desk, as if horns in attack,
pointed threats like the now of Lorca's dream.
That's the language he was raised with.
The boy knows the romance of bulls and art.
He has studied the Bronze Age sculptures,
the Picasso sketches. They concur that
the modern world begins as Pedro Romero
saves an aristocrat fallen from horseback,
distracts the bull with his own hat.
Or perhaps it was Romero's grandfather who
brought an era in on foot. Well, stories
differ, but so does truth from what happened.
The boy knows of Romero's greatness.
Killing six thousand bulls without a scar,
his death at 84 in his birthplace of Ronda,
which boasts the world's most ancient ring.
An arena of stone. The frown of Belmonte,
the long-limbed grace of Joselito,
the return at sixty of that national rogue
El Cordobs. He has learned. Veronica,
media veronica, breast pass. Puntilla, a dagger
stabbed into the bull's head when he refuses
to die, sits with a black tongue out,
pissing himself, shiny in his own blood.
He knows a country so enamored of duende,
a term he comprehends only by sound,
that no one separates the real from the dance.
He knows this last especially, sometimes feels
he has lived his whole life that way.
The fear in his heart he doesn't speak of.
Unable to divide instructed passions -
attacking horns, photos of victory or shame,
the arc of a human scream - from a submerged
reverence for life. Six thousand bulls.
