The world is full of arrows

that direct you various ways.

Once there was this strange old black man I talked to on a subway in Boston. He was selling poems, photocopies of poems he had written, and we bought one. His handwriting was very strange, really shaky, as if his hand quivered when he wrote (did I see him write something down as well? I think so, but cannot be sure) but it was very neat nonetheless, with a peculiar slant to the letters. I don't know what his poem said, I can't remember, I have it somewhere. He had notebooks with him, and talked also in a shaky voice, and was saying something about the Chinese language, and even had Chinese characters written down in his book, and the next moment he was talking about ancient Greek philosophers, and it seemed that this man's breadth of knowledge must be huge, even if nothing he said quite made sense. I wrote his name down, and he said he was in the phonebook, in case we wanted to buy more poems. I called the number twice or so, I think he was listed in Roxbury, but both times it rang on and one and nobody answered. I'd have been curious to see the man's house, more than wanting to buy more poems.