Once, W.H. Auden chanced to meet
the actor Boris Karloff on a plane.
There sat the poet in his first-class seat,
tight-fastened belt unable to restrain
his glee at meeting Frankenstein’s zapped corpse
(the movie star was maybe eighty then –
his famous browbone lightly bore the warps
and weatherings of age). These two great men,
both of them English-born, were preordained
to let their elbows graze in aerial motion,
shoe-leather hovering far above the ocean;
for only at high altitudes unstained
by worldly prejudice can poets be
allowed to brush against celebrity.