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Leonie Rushforth

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Heroic

Everything on the edge of the drop,
and I, as if already falling,
decapitate you in these old photographs in Ronda.

Inside the hotel we ate game. A long meal
under high ceilings. Linen shrouded
tables laid with heavy knives.

The bar roared in the late afternoon as we
surfaced blinking into a hot crowd of red
and gold, gathering for the corrida

and, at the centre of the noise, a woman
like a doll or a bird, gallant
in the capework of her glance.

Back at the house holding onto pink rocks,
my head was full of fire. I lived in fear
of flames and dared not smoke.

On the front page of the paper, Gorbachev’s
naked face on a screen in his dacha
where he wore his Tolstoyan shirt stared

into the unthinkable. The radio
crackled its news in the dark. On every side
the night animals pressed

their advantage while we sweated it out
on the edge of the drop, by the light of the moon, about
to surrender to ritual, to insert the sword.

 

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