Hemingway

To my left sits a gentleman who befriended Ernest Hemingway
In Paris, upon whom Papa based the most likeable character
In his stories. To his left sits a lady who loves those winter
Afternoons she spends with her menagerie of musical animals.
And her main man, whom she met in New Hampshire. The man
On her left can deploy seventeen syllables across three lines

And sum up each one of us, undivided by party lines.
Corny though it sounds, we're the team that Hemingway
Never captained, and the man to the haiku maestro's left is a man
Who knows a great deal about Twin Peaks and the character
Of its creator, David Lynch. OK, Liz has the floor. "If animals
Differ from humans, is it because we work in warm offices in winter,

Or is it?" Next to her Lady Lindsay keeps her focus on winter
As described by Wallace Stevens in the fifteen lines
Of "The Snow Man." Stevens's granddaughter (not) sees animals
Mate in dreams and concludes we live in a zoo. What would Hemingway
Do, I wonder, if commanded to write a story about such diverse characters?
Sir Mark stammers meaningfully and lets Sir David finish the sentence. Man,

That was some sentence, I can tell you. The last names of a woman and a man
In this room are near anagrams, and Mr. Sewell gives Ms. Wells a look of winter,
And Maggie and Melinda glance alliteratively at Michael and Mark, characters
All in the mystery poem I didn't write, which would have had unlabored lines
About Liesel's love of The Odyssey and Nick's erasure of Hemingway
And Amy's lawbreaking poem "1 Train, Coffin Ride," in which circus animals

Read about Britney Spears's cleavage in the tabloids. Did "The Circus Animals'
Desertion," one of Yeats's great last poems, trigger that dream? "A man
And a woman and a blackbird are one," Kati says. Jen agrees. Hemingway
Is far from her thoughts. LeAnne's secret persona is a blues singer named Deaf Winter
Roosevelt, who is unafraid of Virginia Woolf. Veronica dashes off lines
About the cello boy on the M86.bus, and hopes this handsome character

Doesn't turn out to be a Republican. Jen thinks Liesel might add some character
Development in her hypothetical poem about a pair of fucking animals
Whose names are simply you and I, or he and she, or Eve and Adamski, or man
And woman. Maggie's Mother Persona Avoidance program merits fourteen lines,
And her Anti-Mother Toolkit would, I believe, have enchanted Hemingway.
What a pity that we must disband with the arrival of winter.

"Let's warm our winter hearts," says the uncouth shepherd, a character
You won't find in Hemingway, who doesn't hunt wild animals in Africa
And knows few things are too great to treat in thirty-nine lines.