On Hemingway For Hemingway Because Of Hemingway

“…all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything…” – From For Whom the Bell Tolls

I read you too early in my life.

The elephant story

the beautiful bloody Italy

each and others

the Toll Across the Garden of Green Sun Also

stories of Feast

before I was 20.

Then I turned poet

and last night

watched how people loved you.

A QUED special.

I remembered Mr. Kester calling me a fool

because you wrote women

without faces or looks in their eyes

but you loved so many

in bed in character in time.

You remind me of a Kansan

who couldn’t live in his mother’s eyes.

He ran away

to the Philippines.

I saw a picture of him at 21 on a hill

dressed with trees.

I thought of you

I thought of him

and small towns.

And I think that is why you wrote

between the lines.

But I forgot what they said

about you and your mother

who cussed at you

for cussing in books.

I forgot most everything and thought I should write

poetically without words

for you.

Then I remembered that people die

when they make love they die when they stop

to make love

stop on some sort of mountain.

I wonder how the earth could have moved.

I wonder how the bullet must have tingled

every nerve.

A.P. Kruise lives in her husband's house north of Pittsburgh, PA.  She will be graduating with a M.F.A. from Goddard College in July 2006.  To pay the bills and to pay the bills only, she is a key-poker in a gray office headed by corporate America.