Go far, dear book

and speak again of meteors and men, how the poet held a running grasp on life, catching it up and letting it go simultaneously free as a red robin in winter, yet rooted as the almond tree in spring come awake in pink blooms in full cloud on Tuesday, become carpet of petals underfoot by next Sunday night. The falling.

I knew him not as the musician, actor and playwright, but as a magician. I even met him in a blackout. His old cottage was ablaze with candlelight that first night. Where the flames grew between the elm logs in the inglenook fireplace, he carefully positioned lumps of coal, to extend the fire into the night. He listened and watched till the embers became muted and the silences grew apart. It was there he spoke carefully of Gogarty and Stephens, Plotinus and Steven McKenna's translations, Darwin's grandchildren at the zoo, Shelley's presence of mind filling a bathtub of ice for his child's fever, authors who simply cannot read their own work aloud, and worse, authors who return and tamper with earlier drafts, to "improve" today something they'd written a long time ago, or how some plants insist on blooming early, forsyth and almond being two examples. And did you know "glamour" and "grammar" are the same?

He reached for the matches, plucking one of the two wooden ends offering themselves to him from the shut box, poked around the bowl of his pipe for a bit and then touched the flame to its contents, curls and wafts of smoke now joining their counterparts in fire and candle till there was an almighty haze over the proceedings as each book became a doorway to another world. When he took down Coleridge, we all went to the Lakes and complained about the damned postman who knocked too soon. Blake took longer to get back from his long walks, maybe days. And Stephens calmed us all down again, got our breathing to follow the rhythm of goats on their path until we looked down and saw our own souls big as life right there in the room.