Dennis Doherty 

for Hemingway

 

Guilty. And why not?
You’ve had a fine day’s 
work; the world can
curse your cocky strut –
Beard to the horizon –
and wish you toward your crux,
for you’ve done something
cleanly and well: fixed
a fractured sentence
knitted stronger at the wound;
cooked stew that smelled
of onion, herb, and fields
of wine soaked cloves;
declared love in words bold,
fatal as Roland’s song;
thrilled children with spikes high
sliding into home;
planted bulbs in a good place:
the fast and tragic April sun.  

Refine the death that whets the air.
Each moment is an act of grace;
each action is a runic stone.
Construct the rhetoric
of guts; birthe bricking towers
of ritual basic as bread,
of chords, peril plumbed.
It’s pretty to think on buds
In chance clusters, but
fibrous will’s muscle forks
roots of purple stock in mad
union with the ground it pounds.  

Soon, the antidote to structure, sleep –
doom – confounder of control that
can’t be cornered. Don’t pick about
this petty mort; drink its grape-red blood.
Artifice, that universal intersect,
is your communal human proof.
Embrace what’s wild and what’s been bred.
Stride through fools and faults and fears
toward your soul’s roving own.