(For Dickie)

Mine is South Pacific, 1958
Yours is For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1943

South Pacific is so much more you,
filmed as it was on Kauai, your favorite
Hawaiian island, which you gave to me,
along with Mt. Makana, renamed Bali Hai
for the movie.

And while you can’t beat the combination
of Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman
as guerrilla fighters, For Whom the Bell Tolls
was not about WWII, which you were born
in the middle of, but Hemingway’s take
on the Spanish Civil War.

But it was filmed in California, our home state,
in the Sierra near Sonora Pass, the actors
and crew having to scramble around
snowy granite boulders,

Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman allegedly
engaged in an affair to remember,
which, is, of course, how we entangled
ourselves nearly five decades later.
Cooper and Bergman sparked, flamed
and burnt out quickly.

We, my dear, are still here—
creakier, crankier, the bell beginning to toll—
our days together certainly numbered,
but we’ll take the ones allotted to us,
we’ll take ’em all, happily (won’t we?)
ever after.