Hemingway’s House

I don’t want to go to Hemingway’s house,
let him come to mine, walk in and we’ll do
The Killers at my kitchen table, he with his
back to the Japanese maple, me with my back
to the Maytag, ginger ale for one, white rum
the other; the dragon and the mayfly, death and the knowledge of death,
Monk and Bartók all the same to me.

Gerald Stern
“Hemingway’s House” is from Everything is Burning (W. W. Norton, 2005).