Wow! A top-of-the-head-off poem, Vassilis. The way line 4 takes us back to the title, back to that July in Idaho, when I was 11; or the way the last line ironizes the marriage ceremony for the purpose of revelation. Terrific stuff....
By the way, you probably know this poem but I thought I'd pass it along—Archibald MacLeish's elegy for Papa:
Hemingway
“In some some inexplicable way an accident.” —Mary Hemingway
Oh, not inexplicable. Death explains, that kind of death: rewinds remembrance backward like a film track till the laughing man among the lilacs, peeling the green stem, waits for the gunshot where the play began;
rewinds those Africas and Idahos and Spains to find the table at the Closerie des Lilas, sticky with syrup, where the flash of joy flamed into blackness like that flash of steel.
The gun between the teeth explains. The shattered mouth foretells the singing boy.
Thanks for the comments and for reminding me of MacLeish's elegy; so you were all of 11 in the summer of '61, eh? I was an old-timer, all of 17! Still remember my shock upon hearing of Hemingway's suicide--incomprehensible to me at that time. No longer.
Wow! A top-of-the-head-off poem, Vassilis. The way line 4 takes us back to the title, back to that July in Idaho, when I was 11; or the way the last line ironizes the marriage ceremony for the purpose of revelation. Terrific stuff....
ReplyDeleteBy the way, you probably know this poem but I thought I'd pass it along—Archibald MacLeish's elegy for Papa:
Hemingway
“In some some inexplicable way an accident.”
—Mary Hemingway
Oh, not inexplicable. Death explains,
that kind of death: rewinds remembrance
backward like a film track till the laughing man
among the lilacs, peeling the green stem,
waits for the gunshot where the play began;
rewinds those Africas and Idahos and Spains
to find the table at the Closerie des Lilas,
sticky with syrup, where the flash of joy
flamed into blackness like that flash of steel.
The gun between the teeth explains.
The shattered mouth foretells the singing boy.
Joe,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments and for reminding me of MacLeish's elegy; so you were all of 11 in the summer of '61, eh? I was an old-timer, all of 17! Still remember my shock upon hearing of Hemingway's suicide--incomprehensible to me at that time. No longer.