Keats' birthday

The night before Keats' birthday the poet WH Auden walked up to me, asking for a cigarette.

I searched in my golf bag for an American Spirit, fished a cigarette out of the crumpled pack and was just about to hand it to Auden when the thought occurred to me: hey, what am I getting out of this deal?

"Ok Auden," I said, seeing how longingly he was looking at the cigarette, "I'll tell give you this cigarette if you give me your face."

I'd always admired Auden's face, in that it could have only been his face, his face had everything he'd done with his life, good and bad, large and small, its triumphs and mistakes, and looked only like Auden's face, like he'd lived his whole life in it.

We haggled back-and-forth. Auden said he preferred unfiltered cigarettes–I'd offered a filter-tip low tar cigarette– but he was willing to make the deal and give me his face for as long as it took him to smoke the cigarette I was giving him.

Deal consummated; no contract, just a gentleman's agreement. Auden peeled off his face, and I presented him the cigarette and an old yellow Bic lighter I'd found at the bottom of my golf bag.

However, Auden's face did not fit mine. For one thing he was much older than I am now, and jowly, and the effects of nicotine, sleeplessness, and a diet of gin and olives had caused great fissures to crawl across his skin so that his countenance had become a great Arabian desert trodden by the horse hooves of conquering armies. Though I admired the face greatly there was no way I could live long enough to catch up to it and wear it comfortably.

I stood, silent as is proper in such situations, waiting as Auden smoked the cigarette, while holding his face in my right hand, knowing I was in the presence of a man who had written the second greatest line in English poetry, "We must love one another or die." I watched Auden smoke the cigarette right down to the filter, then put the thing in his trouser pocket. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

When our little encounter ended it was the morning of October 17, John Keats' birthday, the poet who wrote, "a thing of beauty is a joy forever."