And the Sea
Once, I wanted to be Hemingway.
But so did Hemingway. That act is hard—
dumb facts decked out as art, and anyway,
who gets what they want? And then who cares?
What matters when the water at your feet
is running out without you? I grew my beard
and bought a little boat on credit, named
it after myself and painted all of it blue,
then put us out to sea. And when it’s calm
and when the sun is out, we disappear.
We’re gone. What else was I supposed to do?
Copyright © 2015 by Patrick Ryan Frank. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 7, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Ernest Hemingway’s masculinity—practiced and somewhat desperate—was just as artful and twice as revealing as his writing. It was all posture and performance, and I sympathize with that self-consciousness, that manufactured bravado.”
—Patrick Ryan Frank
Patrick Ryan Frank
Patrick Ryan Frank is the author of The Opposite of People (Four Way Books, 2015). He lives in Austin, Texas.