My friend won’t be with us long—he knows that, I know that, and last night when I 
visited he wanted to give me books. Even outside the front door I could smell the cigar 
smoke in his study, and when I went downstairs he was in his leather chair as always, the 
cut-glass dish of candy beside him, those orange crescents granuled with sugar. It felt so 
good to be there.
	“Here’s one,” he said. “You’ll get a kick out of this. Drink Laudanum and Live! 
Someone told me Coleridge read this.
	“And this one: Car Crash Sculpture: A Survey of Interactive Accidental Art. 
Think I’ll last long enough to get one of those for my garden, my friend? Maybe my 
smashed ’57 DeSoto? Think there’s enough room for it out there?
	“And here,” he said, “take one more: Blind Certainty in the Darkness—isn’t that 
just the best damned title you’ve ever heard? It’s about an Antarctic expedition gone 
wrong, the leader’s supposed to be charting the way, but he brings The Collected Stevens 
in his pack and gets obsessed with Stevens’ ‘The Snow Man,’ goes a little nuts, thinks 
they can navigate by sound, keeps chanting, ‘For the listener, who listens in the snow . . .’ 
in that doleful Stevens voice…This one doesn’t end well.”
	Then he laughed—that liquid smoker’s laugh of his—and I thanked him, and 
kissed him on the top of the head, and took my books and left.