A Meeting in Copenhagen

We are sitting at an airport
in Copenhagen drinking a lot of coffee.
It was most elegant there,
                           and comfortable,
and refined to the point of lassitude.
Then suddenly he appeared--
                            that old man--
in a plain green parka with a hood,
his face
         deep tanned by salt and wind--
loomed up
          rather
                 than appeared.
He walked,
           furrowing through a crowd of tourists,
as if he’d just been sailing a boat,
and like the sea foam
                      his beard,
whitening it,
              fringed
                      his face.
With grim victorious determination
he walked,
           generating a big wave,
that swept through the modernized
                                  antique,
through every sort of antiqued modernity.
And pulling open the coarse collar of his shirt,
he, rejecting a vermouth and a pernod,
ordered a glass of Russian vodka at the bar
and pushed back the tonic with his hand:
                                         "No!"
With rough-hewn hands, all scarred
                                   and dented,
in boots that made a mighty clatter,
in trousers indescribably stained and greasy,
he looked more spruce
                      than anything nearby.
The earth seemed to bend beneath him--
so heavily did he tread upon it.
And one of us said to me with a smile:
"Just look!
            The very spit of Hemingway!"
Expressed in each brief gesture,
                                 he strode off
with a fisherman’s ponderous gait,
all out of granite crudely hewn,
strode as men stride through gunfire,
                                      through the ages,
He strode as if stooping in a trench;
strode shoving chairs and men aside...
He resembled
             Hemingway so much!
Later I learned
                it was, indeed, Hemingway!

Translated by George Reavey