bring the nickel

a found poem

I can't say
how
every
time

I ever put my arms around you
I felt that I was home


Found in Racy Letters from Hemingway to Dietrich to Be Unsealed in this morning's New York Times.

Ernest Hemingway's letters to Marlene Deitrich have just been released -- they reveal a passionate, unconsummated affection between the two. Hemingway is on record as saying, in A.E. Hotchner's biography of the writer: "The thing about the Kraut and me is that we've been in love since 1934, since we first met on the Île de France, but we've never been to bed. Amazing but true. Victims of unsychronized passion."

Another sweet excerpt from Hemingway's letters:

What do you really want to do for a life work? Break everybody's heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel, and I'd bring the nickel.

stock and trade

Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient.

Ernest Hemingway commenting on the electroconvulsive therapy that he received shortly before his suicide. As quoted by Jane Brody in the Science section of today’s New York Times.

sight unseen

The majority of Germans have never seen a living Jew.

Daniel, a German and a Rabbi, whose last name I’m afraid I didn’t catch. He’s one of three Rabbis who were ordained today in Dresden, Germany – the first Jewish religious officials to be ordained in that country since the end of World War II. Interviewed today on the PRI’s The World radio program.

So few words. So much suffering. Like Hemingway’s six word story: For sale: baby shoes, never used.