How I Learned

   I had seen him
kneeling in the dirt of the churchyard
reading the script on the stones with his fingers —
   letters illegible to me back then.
But the door to his cottage was never open.
You’d see him sometimes through his narrow window,
   “away in his books” they’d say in the village.

       Every morning of the world
the smoke from his chimney stood up straight,
            like a verse from Leviticus.

Why he decided I was capable of understanding,
        I’ve no idea. I was still a boy then,
manhood barely glimpsed, till he took me in.
The first thing he taught me was how to build a fire.
He’d lay pine sticks on crumpled
          newspaper, then coal and turf
and chunks of beech he split with his own axe.

Pay attention, he would say—striking a match—
     to how they burn:
        the swift wood, the recalcitrant coal,
   its secrets buried inside it, the slow
turf, spongy when first dug out of the bog,
more a thing of the fields and meadows
       than of the deep-delved earth.

Then the books would come out,
    fetched from their places on his shelves:
word-hoards old and obscure, books of lore,
    titles stamped in gold into their olive boards—
foxed, some of them would have been, but sure.
How reverently he’d open them, gospel and epistle,
         and place them in my hands.

          One day I asked him why he taught me.
“It’s not about you or me,” he said. “When I’m gone
     the books will want someplace to live.”