Elegy for a Spanish Poet

It's one of those brown countries
with narrow streets and iron balconies
from which girls throw flowers.
Today is bull-running day
and somehow you're floating
above the crowds, the runners, and the bull
whose broad back is ribboned with blood
as though he has been broken for a fight,
the spikes they used to goad him
thrust through his flesh like quills,
and orchid twisted around each one.


You drift over roofs caked with pigeon droppings
into a sky so blue it burns.
Your death is the bull's,
far below-
his collapsed form
a stain on the pavement,
swollen in the sun.
In the marketplace
a miniature funeral is passing,
mourners like sad black ants
carrying a matchbox coffin.
The corpse is carved of ice.


You can move where you wish, unseen,
barely more than a breath of wind.
Darkness is falling,
and from the street beneath you
accordion music uncurls
through a lanterned dusk. 

© Robert Lavett Smith