The Moveable Beast

image borrowed from bing

The Moveable Beast

“Writing at its best, is a lonely life, where

the writer, if he is any good, must face eternity,

or the lack of it, each day.”

--Ernest Hemingway

Sure, he had seen the splendor of the Mediterranean

many times when he was a big shouldered kid in his 20’s,

after haunting Parisian cafes, 

smoking fat pungent cigars under red awnings,

traveling with Ezra Pound, or drinking brandy

with James Joyce, draining whole casks during

their “alcoholic sprees”, remembering

Gertrude Stein wearing water wings

in the pool at Monte Carlo in 1925, 

but hell,

he had learned to love the Caribbean best, 

barefoot from the puncheon deck of the Pilar 

as it drafted the fishing coasts 

along the islands in the stream,

first applauding Castro’s victory over Batista,

then cursing it when he got wind 

that the new government was going to seize 

all the homes of the wealthy;

consistently surfing the maelstrom of personal calamity,

dancing with death countless times, courting it but never

consummating the affairs, laughing at it each time it was

jilted, especially in 1954 when he survived two plane

crashes on the plateaus of Africa, reading aloud

his own obituary in several newspapers.

Jesus, it seemed that he had never lived alone,

had been married continuously, first

to Elizabeth Hadley Richards (1921-1927),

to Pauline Pffeiffer (1927-1940),

to Martha Gellhorn (1940-1945),

and to his darling Mary since 1946,

yet here he was, just a solitary figure

wandering in pain within the landscape

of his life--wondering if there would be room

for all their names as sculptured script

below his own on his tombstone.

Sunday morning, July 2, 1961, he awoke

at 5 a.m. to watch the Idaho sunrise

over his Ketchum shamba, its intensity

helping him to sidestep his near blindness.

Saturday’s paper was open on the coffee table,

turned to the society page where certain items

were circled in red ink, two real pearls:

“Martha Helen Kostyra, 19, married Andrew Stewart in New York City” 

“Ana Vegas was just crowned as Miss Venezuela.”

He took out a large yellow legal pad and wrote

in longhand his final cahier:

miserable IRS tax issues,

FBI surveillance fears,

a never-ending plague of health issues, 

real sadness regarding his inability to retrieve

his old manuscripts and notes still locked up

in a dusty Havana safe,

the dangerous stranger in his morning mirror,

his disdain for his own critical success, especially

the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1953

and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1954,

all those narrow-lipped asshole editors

at LIFE magazine who kept slashing

his latest article, informing Mary

that he had become “hesitant, disorganized,

confused, and was going blind”,

and all those goddamned forced visits

he had endured at the Mayo clinic, resulting

in twenty “electroconvulsive therapy” treatments,

followed by their diagnosis of him being

“released in ruins”. 

Shivering from empty prayers

and shattered dreams, he hoped

those bastards would not mention

that his father had committed suicide as well,

but pretty sure there would be no media

politeness mantling their reporting of this day,

no syphon of solicitous sympathy.

At 7:10 a.m., moving around like a wounded lion

in his basement, he removed two 12-gauge shotgun shells 

from his tattered hunting raincoat, 

opened his polished oaken gun case 

and removed his favorite Boss double-barreled shotgun,

struggling upstairs with it cradled in his arms,

pushing his black leather easy chair in front

of the large picture window in his foyer,

pulling back the blood red velvet curtains,

then twisting the chair around to face the front door

before sitting down in it, hearing 

the leather creak under him,

placed his trusty Boss butt-first 

on the white rug between his legs, 

pulled back the beautiful twin hammers

click-click, placed the double barrels gently

into his smiling mouth, and closed his eyes

in order to properly greet the great bull of Paloma

that was rushing huge down upon him,

and just before the goring he heard

the roar of the crowd rise up

like a cannon shot,

and then it was over.

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on Shawna's Flipside Records

Posted over on dVerse Poets OLN

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