![]() ![]() ![]() For here was the great man - so suddenly. My heart had begun to beat erratically like some small, perishable creature - a butterfly or moth - might beat against its confinement. ![]() The entire face was large - larger than you expect a poet’s face to be - and the thick jaws were covered in glittering little hairs, as if the poet hadn’t shaved for a day or two. ![]() The snowy-white hair so often captured in photographs, like ectoplasm lifting from the poet’s head, was thinner than any photograph had suggested, and not so snowy white, in fact disheveled, as if the poet had only just risen, dazed, from sleep. The sensitive-young-poet face of the photos (at least, the photos I’d affixed to my bedroom wall) had coarsened and thickened deep lines now bracketed the eyes, as if the seventy-seven-year-old poet had too often scowled or squinted. You would not have called him fat, but his torso sagged against his shirt like a great udder, and his thighs in summer trousers were fleshy, like those of a middle-aged woman. Here was the first surprise: the great man was much heavier, his body much more solid, than I’d anticipated. ![]()
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