Ernest Hemingway (1899-1960)

In everything there was the end of things,
And the sacred lake glittering all summer,
Until he was too tired and bitter to care;
He spent his life staring down the barrel of a gun,
Cursed by some beautiful hunter’s moon,
Little Huck Finn crying “’Fraid of nothing!”
The hunter’s ritual, the fly fisher’s poise,
Made him the horned god on the hoof,
He dreamed that he had Cheyenne blood,
Blessed by the dark sun of the dead.
The drab suburban days wielded a razor,
The beast was already tracking him;
A cruel traitor lived in the dutiful son,
And a femme fatale in the brother’s skin.
The young ambulanceman picked up the limbs
Of shattered bodies, male and female confused,
Headless corpses, strung-out intestines,
Just hunks of meat in a butcher’s shop;
Soon he too would die and feel his soul
Leave the body, so easily, with stars bursting
Overhead, and drifting downward in a dream;
That was when his second life began.
Love was in the leave-taking, the failure,
Biting the bullet with a crooked smile,
Valorous in the lost cause, double-crossed,
Turning back, afraid, to the company of men.
Who was he fighting, in the end, but himself?
To play against the odds: that was the game.
Parisian safari filled his copybooks with wildlife;
He painted his own Cézannes in café corners,
Shadowboxed the future, walking in the rain;
History went to ground in cheap rooms,
Observing its own reflection in a cracked mirror;
Truth attained the deep authority of dream.
He had the knack, and no end of good luck,
Until his luck ran out; then the matador’s sword
Went in between the shoulders, piercing the heart;
He used up everything, and got used up.
Memory’s rat trap snapped up a world,
And chewed its bones with sly exactitude;
The brave man and the coward both knew
Their sinfulness, behind the brag and bluster,
Each an impostor, a double, on manoeuvres.
He wanted it back: that old sense of immortality,
As he played Russian roulette with the days,
Algebraic gambler, spooked, and losing his mind.