Tomorrow.

WITH THE RESULTING STILLNESS

There is nothing like Africa

as there is nothing like youth …

or waking each day not knowing what the day will bring

but knowing that it will bring something.

We rode out to the cemetery

through the country he wrote about.

I like to write standing up.

He was buried in a plain pine coffin,

newly painted black so that the paint

came off on the faces and the hands …

Simles are like defective ammunition …

and leaving was like an amputation.

I got your check cashed

it like a son of a bitch. ...

About the smell of death part …

That is all a writer of fiction is.

Let me know when we start to get rich.

Your legend grows like the barnacles

on the bottom of a ship …

The sea is the sea. The old man

is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish

s a fish. But nobody likes to be tailed.

The question is: can you write?

If I praise your damn poetry any more

you'll think I'm a fairy or a critic …

Hadley joins in congratulations …

No I don't think "My Old Man"

derives from Anderson.

            Dear Miss Stein:

We have been killing cattle –

killing lions for the Masai.

It is lovely now and hurricane months . . .

are very beautiful. And how is Zelda?

I get damned maudlin about how swell

you are. Today your letter … came.

—wash and peel all the fruit you eat.

Let us take up the word bitch again.

To get back to your letter.

… Liquor is the only mechanical relief.

The sharks are all sharks no better …

I am as committed as an armoured

column in a narrow defile …

Mary sends her very best. Yours in belle lettres. P.S.

It has always been my ambition.

That is all a writer of fiction is.

Especially when you look forward

like hell to getting mail … Patrick

got a hundred in so many subjects

that we decided it is a lousy school.

Almost like a genius. I'm sure

we should all be happy as kings.

I wish Charlie and Max were alive

because they would have had fun.

The world is so full of a number of things.

Seems like a pretty good basic slogan

for any time. About dying:

We must do it but there is no reason

we should give it importance.

Only lets hurry to get to Havana and to Key West …

We sail for Spain in May

… it is a story about a boy

who has come back from the war.

The war is never mentioned.

The Buick is running well.

This may be one of the things that helps it.

She found a way of writing

that was like writing letters all the time.

… very possible that tearing down

is more important than building up.

Nobody knows about the generation

that follows them … But maybe

will get around to that later.

It's wonderful to be a writer.

Sometimes it's like drilling rock

and then blasting it out with charges.

You know I am superstitious

and it is a hell of a damned dirty business …

To make a pitcher of Bloody Marys

(any smaller amount is worthless) …

You write a fine letter kid.

Don't forget to blow your nose and turn

around three times before you go to

bed. That way you can always go on.

I want life to hold some mysteries.

Bumby, my oldest boy … is somewhere

around fifteen sixteen or seventeen.

He had a very steep trajectory

and was almost like a guided missile

with no one guiding him.

Must truly get to work now.

Boiling it down always

rather than spreading it out thin.

Going fishing next week.

(… and live to be a wise old man

with white beard and chew tobacco)

No'one you love is ever dead.

I would like to have the proofs as soon

as possible. Tomorrow is my birthday.

There is something morbid about it.

… and didn't he know that the man

in The Snows of Kilimanjaro could have

spoken of him, or thought of him …

but-it was always full of pity

as though you had a butterfly or a moth

for a friend. Then, now …

Very hard to write. How does it go?

And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Stephen Bodnar

This is a poem made of entirely of lines, or parts of lines, from Hemingway’s letters.