Elegy for the Matador

The Best American Poetry · 2 years ago · 69 views

For theToreador . . . this is your reward The Matador of Metaphor The grapefruit in the tropical orchard has ripened into a globe in Hartford for him to look at, not to eat. If he had a tin can, he would beat it as a drummer in a band beats his drum and steadily with a swish and sometimes a gong. It’s his wish to escape from gray walls and sky into a Denmark of the inner eye or a bullring south of the border or a sky espied from the trenches of a battlefield in Flanders. Wenches wander into his wonderland. Order is disorder squared. We are nowhere else but here, yet live we do in metaphor like that elegant square-shouldered matador. -- DL        Related Stories "Love Me or Leave Me" with Doris Day (1955)