The day Ernest Hemingway died, my mother went to my father’s house,
her future husband, and threw rocks at his window like coins
into a wishing well until he cracked the sill and looked out.
They went down to the local park and practiced jumping off the swings,
one by one, timing each other, trying to see which one could
spend the longest number of seconds in the air, arms spread,
white flesh gleaming in the moonlight, the still blackness crowding in,
a moment of expectation before the fall, like dipping a toe
into scalding hot bath water to test the temperature.
Ernest Hemingway was dead, his body slumped over somewhere
within a sprawling house in Ketchum, Idaho,
the flies already beginning to gather,
and my parents were making love inside an abandoned car
by the river’s edge, bodies rising over one another like cranes
about to demolish a tower, spring’s dark honeysuckle blossoms
climbing the fences, the blue glare of a neighbor’s flickering TV
illuminating my father’s face as he hefted my mother’s breasts
in his hands, feeling their soft weight, nectarines slowly ripening
into tempting fruit. And at the exact moment they reached
the climax, my mother’s tongue taking root in my father’s mouth
like a freshly-planted bulb, Hemingway’s body was discovered,
shotgun by his side. In all the years after when she told the story,
my mother left out the part about sex in the car, and, instead,
spoke of the weightless feeling reached at the moment
her body left the swing and she fell down, down, like a body
from a high window, into my father’s arms.
He caught her every time.