Troy Jollimore

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
January 25, 2018 Jollimore Troy

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Joel and Ethan Coen, 2006

 

 

… death heightens every tension and permits us fewer
of the half-truths by which we normally live.

Laurence Durrell

 

 

This is No Country for Old Men. The young
Llewellyn Moss, a Texan born and bred,
happens upon a cash-bag and some dead
hombres. He’ll join those corpses before long,

dispatched not by a captive-bolt stun gun
to his serenely confident forehead,
as some folks, like our good friend Sheriff Ed
Tom, might well have seen coming—no, he’s done

in off-screen by some nameless killer. Death,
in this rough country, is anonymous
and indiscriminate, indifferent as

the tossed coin that determines your last breath,
or the formula that graphs the curved flight plan
of a bag of cash tossed into no man’s land.

 

 

 

 

Troy Jollimore’s books of poetry are Syllabus of Errors, At Lake Scugog, and Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2006.