This evening I had a wonderful encounter with a poet. There is a man, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen him, who sometimes stands by the side of the road in Harvard Square and recites poems at 50 cents a pop. He holds a sign with the names of four or five poems and the number of their lines, and he stands straight and tall and serious. He wears a black hat and a faded pink scarf around his neck and a canvas duffle bag sits next to him on the ground. Today after work I had my camera with me and I asked him if he would mind if I took some pictures of him while he recited a poem. He demurred politely, saying that it seemed a sort of personal thing, and that it didn’t seem entirely appropriate. Suitably chastened, I asked him if I could buy a poem anyway, and he smiled and recommended two: “On a Mountaintop,” (#13), for its technical interest, and “Springtime (S.N.E.– Southern New England), (#16), for its rhyme. I told him I would have both, and after I handed him a dollar he bowed his head, concentrated, and began to recite. Every line came slowly and with the utmost deliberateness, as if issuing from deep inside him, and the words he spoke had a simple, graceful clarity of expression. Leaves, trees, winds, waters, skies, snow, light.

Above the noise of the cars passing behind him he drew pictures of woods and streams that hung in the air like paintings. After each poem he raised his head and accepted my thanks with a smile. As he recited, his left eye sometimes scrunched up in concentration, and sometimes both brown eyes, and only rarely did his gaze meet mine. Later, when we were talking, he looked up at me more often.

I don’t even remember how the conversation started between us after the poetry, but by the time I left him and looked at my watch over an hour had gone by and I had missed my train as we stood on the street, deep in talk of religion, art, America, Singapore, human nature, and spirituality. He was formal, eloquent, calm, thoughtful, intelligent and well-read, and we each exchanged our thoughts slowly and deliberately. His smiles in response to his own wry statements, or mine, made of his face a beautiful thing. He would not tell me his name, or let me tell him mine. He would not say if he would be there another day, because he could only take things one day at a time. He would not shake my hand. All these things, he said, seemed kind of personal, and he was of a formal bent. Perhaps, he said, it was not the fashion in this country today to be this way, but, perhaps, it should be. He told me a lot about Christian Science and its thinking and practices, but said he had his reservations about it despite being sort of raised in its traditions. He was careful always to remind both of us that things are not always what they seem. He said he had once had a kind of healing experience, and so was interested in the testimonies of healings from all faiths. Between us we brought up and discussed Judaism, Methodism, Quakers, Buddhism, Mormonism, and Transcendentalism. We wondered about the difficulty of articulating the difference between religion and cult. And all the time it was as if I were sitting at a table having tea with a delightful acquaintance.

This entry, from an email I wrote in 2001, predates the existence of this blog. It was posted here as background to this entry.