A Letter Addressed "Ernest Hemingway"

lands on his notebook, next to a Corona typewriter, wiped down

to remove signs of a daiquiri’s salt rim that sloshed over the edge

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onto the bible yellow of the book. Sober scrawls fill its happy pages,

songs of firemen clapping as he drives their trucks on his grounds

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after a firework landed in a palm tree, drawings of the Marlin caught

from his boat on the Cuban waterways and set free back to itself,

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and there, side by side, two love letters, one in deep sea red ink,

the other in careful green, to the women he loved – a foghorn love,

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that still fills navy skies with applause. Happy birthday for today, Papa,

and tomorrow, may the dawn again be yours. I wrote the letter to him

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after I’d lost my keys and it rained hot, fat pellets, orange in the gas

lit streetlamps, dreaming of his slender, surgical hands fixing things,

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white ash cracklings on the fire. By the time I grew up he was gone,

though I know he spent so much time waiting for me. At least the sun

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is never different, bible yellow, the colour of his books as he thumped

his keys, the beat gaining again, an admiration in high notes of black ink.