Lolly said, “I like the cemetery overlook. It’s got the best view of the bay.”

Cemeteries were right up my alley these days, all gloom and death and misery. I didn’t want to come right out and bring up Mathias, so we talked about one thing or another, the trail, the trees, and then everything opened up and there was a little space to sit, and the view below us of the rows of white tombstones, the scallops of blue water, the cloud tops, the towers of the bridge. And you could forget, until of course you remembered, that those white stones were not just scenery, but that each one marked a fallen soldier.

We settled ourselves on a bench and Lolly sighed.

“So, Mathias. He was what I call a loud poet. Everything at top volume and maximum intensity. There are other registers, you know. And everything was self, self, self! You have to at least try to get beyond that.”

I thought that was probably Buddhist-talk, though I didn’t know enough to say anything more about it. “I guess you didn’t like him.”

“Liking or not liking, one more thing you try and get beyond. I felt sorry for him. He wasn’t a happy person. Or anytime he was happy, it was too much like his poems, big and loud. And of course, unsustainable. I don’t know what, exactly, was wrong with him.”

“That was going to be my next question.”

“Depression? Mania? Both? But he certainly made the most of it. Oh, he had charisma. But he took up all the oxygen in the room. Fighting the universe, instead of letting it take its course. Self again. Self-dramatizing, self-indulgence, and finally, self-destruction.”

Lolly stopped speaking and we looked out on the trees and clouds and water for a time. I thought I was pretty self, self, self also. I didn’t know any other way to be. The rows of white stones made me a little dizzy, a little sick. Who wouldn’t want to be more than that, one of many, anonymous, forgotten?

I hadn’t read many of Lolly’s poems. The ones in Compass Points were excellent, small and graceful. But she’d probably never be famous, notorious. People seemed drawn to messy lives and bad behavior.

I asked Lolly to tell me about the reading, the last one Mathias ever gave. She sighed.

“It was awful. He was in such bad shape by then. Some writers get themselves so worked up, so full of doubt and anxiety, they can’t write. It hadn’t been going well for him, he hadn’t produced anything new for a while. He was supposed to be coming out with a new collection and it kept getting pushed back. And everybody knew. By ‘everybody,’ I mean our little circle of poets, serious poets. There were never that many of us. But we regarded ourselves as so important!