Old Hemingway

Looking at last from his purgatorio 
and what imagined growing out of the mind's 
mist and the alcohol: a stony hillside 
and asphodel waving its strengthless heads 
above dry grasshoppers as perished souls 
of warriors once as angular as they: 
or wards of beds for old men, where the nurse 
chatters and plumps the pillows, and orderly 
subfiends in white dish out the daily cigarette, 
the weekly sherry or the annual girl: 
rations are purgatory, and he dreams 
forward or is it back to paradise 
and the wave dimpled at the Cyprian feet: 
he lost his world of servants in white coats, 
comic headwaiters thought as wise as kings 
serving him Capri Scala chilled in pails 
to warm the mistress never found as wives, 
his childish nymph who so admired old satyrs 
or old counts or colonels, old writers past writing: 
but more he lost, the painter's hand in the stroke 
that drew the gray taste of coffee, at iron 
tables set next the street and by string chairs, 
the sidewalk look, light growing in whose trees 
washed last night's conscience from the shabby teeth: 
drew duck on tarns and windows full of fish 
or war's look sprawled as soldiers all asleep 
in the corridor and one who sat to watch 
block stations and canals go by the window 
and the hours clicking out on joints of rails: 
lost youth lost art and mumbled till he knew 
he mumbled, and so drew the trigger: like one 
of his own brave decrepit fighters dancing 
his final grace of now uncertain art 
too close against the horns, which speared him home.