From the library I procured a book and started reading the poems. There was no reason to think I was going to enjoy them. I was not a particularly artistic kid, and I didn’t work on our high school literary magazine, or write. Nothing was auspicious. I do not remember opening the book. Yet to this day I still remember reading the first few lines of “Musée des Beaux Arts”:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along

and something just clicked. I can’t say I felt I immediately understood everything, but the poem seemed to mean something I could not quite put my finger on, something important to me.