Death in the afternoon

Where did death come from? I meant to say blues, blues in the afternoon, the title of a new painting by Anne McElroy facing me, just hung. I'd seen it at the Station Arts Centre in Rosthern where Lloyd and I and Lynda shared a reading last month. We'd stood in the gallery space chatting with the women who run the place about our event that evening. I began to notice the paintings; the paintings began to rise into me. I chose one, lightly.
It had been in Fes, Morocco, that I found Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon in a bookshop run by the only guy to give me good directions to my hotel that day. It was Death in the Afternoon that led me to the bullring in Seville three weeks later. The bullring was closed for the season but later I sat under the head of Inclusero, the bull, adrift in the afternoon.