Hey Rube....

A porcupine skin,

Stiff with bad tanning,

It must have ended somewhere.

Stuffed horned owl

Pompous Yellow eyed;

Chuck-wills-widow on a biased twig

Sooted with dust.

Piles of old magazines,

Drawers of boy’s letters

And the line of love

They must have ended somewhere.

Yesterday’s Tribune is gone

Along with youth

And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach

The year of the big storm

When the hotel burned down

At Seney, Michigan.

Along With Youth - Ernest Hemingway

Photo by Lloyd Arnold/Hulton Archive/Getty Images