Back to the page: “The Best Poems of the English Language”
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
La Corrida
El Toro
From the blind kingdom
where his horns are law,
gigantically plunging and charging,
he enters the clockface labyrinth—
man-in-beast, creature
whose guileless power is his doom.
El Matador
In the heart of the maze
whose ritual pathways
goading lance, bloodflowering dart,
veronica and sword define,
the fateful one, fate’s dazzler,
gleams in suit of lights,
prepares for sensual death
his moment of mocking truth.
In the fiery heart of the maze
the bullgod moves, transfiguring death
and the wish to die.
Sol y Sombra
From all we are yet cannot be
deliver, oh redeem us now.
Of all we know and do not wish
to know, purge oh purge us now.
Ole!
Upon the cross of horns
be crucified for us.
Die for us that death
may call us back to life.
Ole!