Toward the end he expressed a certain emptiness in his life.

He would stand sometimes for hours looking out the blue windows of his office down the thin sliver of street to the river. The river was a bruised blue that flowed like women's words, he said. Not too many people knew that about him, that he was a poet. In an early essay called "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois Grind," he addressed the inherent conflict of the contemporary artist compelled to support himself, his family and his art in a daily office setting. "Never have I considered my work in the insurance industry to be anything but a labor of love," he wrote. "There is something rather satisfying in reviewing, approving and rejecting claims. It is an altogether pleasant and diverting way to spend one's day." He considered himself a moderate in all things, equally skeptical of the businessmen who dismissed art as pretentious puffery and the artists who sniffed at the practices of the capitalist. In his poem "Accidents and Poems" he summed up his philosophy briefly and succinctly: Accidents and poems have their own rewards. The latter uplifts while the former affords.

He and his wife were not on speaking terms, though being native New Englanders they were both naturally reserved, so it was at first difficult to tell. She was not overly fond of me either, and was rather upset when he converted to Catholicism. I could see why religion held such an attraction for him. The emptiness was palpable.

I think it was this emptiness that drove him into the arms of the Church. I have always had mixed feelings about deathbed conversions. To me they seem less genuine, more desperate. I don't know if it was that way with him. Maybe it was. My impression was that he had been searching his whole life for some kind of meaning and it probably took something as dramatic as his illness to truly focus him. Certainly he did not come without his doubts, but toward the end I think he'd put all that behind him and decided that there was more than just hollow facts and what you could see. At least I hope that's what he decided.

When he died one of his employees said that he had had no idea that he'd been a poet. He said he'd first heard about it when he read his obituary in the New York Times. He said it probably wouldn't have made any difference if he had known and that knowing he was a poet wouldn't have made him run out and buy a copy of his books. He didn't read poetry. Anybody's. Still, he didn't see anything particularly shameful in being a poet. Some probably lived fairly normal lives. He had a wife and a grown-up daughter and the daughter seemed normal. The wife he wasn't too sure about, but the daughter seemed normal.

Nor was it generally known except in literary circles that he had been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and two National Book Awards. Even so he felt that he had been more successful as a top insurance executive than as a poet. When he died he was still trying to finish a rather hopeless little poem called "Lester the Hypnotist." I didn't find it to be worth preserving, so I destroyed it. His mind was slipping toward the end.

He said that some of his happiest days were as a boy in Reading, Pennsylvania, and later as a newspaper reporter in New York. He said that whatever success he had later in life paled beside the enjoyment he'd had burying his old dad in a pile of orange autumn leaves.

Toward the end he would sometimes stand for hours at the blue windows of his hospital room staring down at the sliver of street to the river which flowed like old age toward the sea, the two blue moons of his aged buttocks showing through the opening of his too-small hospital gown.