She would have none of it. She wanted 
to break under ice to the dark flow
of deeds. What else is a life but what 
we’ve done? she wanted to know.

The other students grew quiet, 
turned to watch the woman old enough 
to be their mother, who’d sat silent 
so long in the back of the room.

She hated that poem, and the man
who wanted to cover and run.
And at first I made the mistake
of taking his side. I knew his Buddhist

heart, but not only the kind 
wish to be known by their inner lives. 
For her, no history or “persona” 
could salvage the lines.

She fought the current, built  
a dam against the poem’s seduction.
It was clear she’d had enough comings 
and goings, alibis, evasions.

Through her life some father or husband,
brother or stranger, must have run
like a molten river. And no pacifist armed 
with a poem could make her back down.
                        

They pause—a man, a woman, their son— 
to scan the windows. Hemingway’s broad face 
smiles through the glass, his head as large
as the man’s torso, and the man, slender, 
wearing glasses, his folders in one hand,
gazes back at the author, thinking—What?
He’ d never be able to shoot a lion? 
Wouldn’t want to? What a shame
so talented a writer turned his gun
on himself? Hemingway looks past him,
perhaps toward a shapely woman across
the street, a woman whose dress hugs
her body, whose heels tick like a clock
against the walk.  A woman who moves as if
she knows a man is watching. Even a man
long dead would notice, to say nothing
of the man staring past his own reflection,
the reflection of his wife so different
in skirt below her knees, sensible 
low-heeled shoes. A wife who drifts
to the other window, gazing at a cookbook
of Thai recipes, though she has never
been to Thailand and does not favor
highly spiced food, while their son eases
into the open door, not sure what he’s
in search of, but restless in his changing body, 
his life ahead like a book not read, or even written.