A character you never meet, only hear of,

A music student in The Sun Also Rises Helping a negro boxer in Vienna after

The crowd went crazy when he floored the home-town

Boy, knocked him cold after two fouls — Is called the local Harvard man by Bill

Who saw the fight, remembers being drunk

And drunkenly recalls the riot, the rescue, The boxer escaping without his street clothes.

The drunken Osterreichers staggered home;

And Bill tells of loaning the fighter money To travel back to his family in Cologne.

Why the fight at all, to give Bill a boxing tale,

A realistic recent past, but as remote as The Eastern Kingdom at its worst could be?

How the Austrians loved their local boy

And hated the American, whose darkness Did nothing to repress the other Vienna’s rage?

We never meet student or fighter, just Bill

Telling their story, with the storyteller’s sense Of the recent past, now in Paris, speaking

Of them; and Jake telling us what he says,

Hemingway redacting the grand drama, The shouting mob, the punch below the belt . . .

I think we called him the local Harvard man Bill remembers, and like Nick Carraway’s Finnish maid Whom we also never meet, we can’t forget.