Sir.

He would stand up as we came in, and go out; but for a second he was there, darkly well dressed, with a haggard beard and shaking hands, against fluttering yellow curtains. Was yellow his choice?
The curtains were always clean, his table orderly, except for Paperwork, which we imagined lurked, hammer in hand, outside his corner office like a ham-handed student.
"Go deeper."
The ham-handed student was terrified of asking him anything, hoping the situation would show her kindness, and he fobbed off all who came to his door, fearing it was Paperwork.
He was sad, later, when he found out it had been people, with questions.
Because he cared, do you know? I cannot guarantee it is not nostalgia—
what is a guarantee in any case? It is a speech act.

He held death at bay with a shaky hand. Illness and solitude he carried
resignedly, and more or less erect. Literature he coaxed to his side from years of devotion,
An old retainer in a shadowy house, warily waiting
The air about him thick with reading, measuring out lengths of poetry
like smoke, immeasurable, savoured.

Where did he go? Into a storm-night, into a rickety car, into a silence
Looking inward, his eyes glittering black and his lips dry?
He caressed space and waved aside time, he wove maps (warp and weft) and
scorned summary.
We did not understand then, and the ragged facts
haunting his death—pain and desolation—we will not now read out as his life.
What he meant, we do not know, (which sometimes made us mad)
But it was bona fide poetry, and worth the care.

He doesn't leap out of bed in the mornings, but it's easy for him to get up early, these days, even if the sun is firmly blocked out, if the world beyond his door is drowsy and unstirring, without time tearingoff ahead of him and mocking his intentions. He hears the alarm calling for him, louder and louder as though his brother stood at the head of the stairs and called, condescending a few steps each time he did not reply. And with no defensiveness and no evasion, he sits up and meets time as he meant to, just as it is paused, with its head cocked, listening to the alarm that has brought him here, before it passes through the door and onward—he sits up and nods at it, friends they are because he has stopped himself pleading (or shouting or muttering) at its retreating back. He does not assume familiarity, there are no loyalty privileges, only the choice over forgetting. He does not seek to manipulate it to neatly time his own escape; he will use his certainties—of himself—to build more, and then more, like a tidy accumulator; and when time comes with infinite patience to wait, and not to pause, he will throw aside his modesty with no threat of reward, and meet it lazily, with spare seconds and minutes and hours tucked away in deep pockets to enable his indulgences, and by then be indifferent to indulgence altogether. Perhaps.