From The Hemingway Poems:

Hemingway in Africa: The Untold Story

During his first trip to the Serengeti
Hemingway killed more than thirty
wild animals, including three lions,
and one uncelebrated parakeet
belonging to the only woman he ever met
but never wrote or talked about.
She must have betrayed him
and one sultry afternoon,
buoyed on Beefeater's,
he popped open the wicker cage
and watched the bird's powder blue flight
to the lower limb of a camphor tree.
He grinned, but not maliciously, knowing
she would not speak to him again.
She must have been beautiful,
the best of the lot, perhaps
more gorgeous than The Kraut herself
to force him to lift up
his elephant gun, his short, ugly,
shockingly big-bored .505 Gibbs,
straight out of the pages of "The Short,
Happy Life of Francis Macomber,"
and blow that parakeet to smithereens.

From Subtle Thieves

An Invitation to the Dance

My Sunday morning cereal dances with sliced bananas
and the New England Patriots are about to blast
the Washington Redskins, and suddenly
Linda waltzes into the room
straight from that debutante ball
at the Waldorf Astoria, nineteen sixty-four,
smiling broadly and reminding me
how to invert my fork tines down on the plate
after I’ve finished my filet mignon.

Because I’m the kind of guy who always takes
advice to heart until I forget it,
because I take everyone seriously
in spurts, I thank her heartily
and three months later, in the soft
sands of Cocoa Beach, where turtles
burrow at night to lay their endangered eggs,
I break our engagement.

Somehow, you know, the way the mind works,
anticipation of the big game,
the way the morning light
plays on those sliced bananas,
Linda stands right there in the kitchen reminding me
the polite thing to do would be
to ask her mother to dance the slow foxtrot.