She remembers it like it was yesterday, Julie Carlson does. It was a couple of days before Christmas, the Andover Bookstore was crowded with shoppers, and the familiar Asian man in the tattered clothes and helmet was waiting in her line. She felt a pang of apprehension, knowing his broken English was tough to understand.
But when the reed-thin customer got to the register and began reciting a poem in perfect, tailored English, the confusion of Carlson's day gave way to the lyrical majesty of the moment. She stared, mesmerized, and others did as well.
''He finished the poem with a little smile,'' Carlson recalled yesterday. ''My breath was taken away it was so beautiful. He bought two small volumes of poetry and was gone.''
His name, she would later learn, was Sein Kyi. He was a 52-year-old immigrant from Burma, a resident of Lawrence, a worker in a cardboard factory who made minimum wage and sent most of the money back to his homeland, where his wife and three of their children remained.
But that's the silhouette, the cardboard cutout, so to speak. Far beyond the vital statistics of this unusual little man was something that nudged closer to his heart: an abiding love of poetry.
Some immigrants chase the American dream up to the economic stratosphere and, with sprawling houses and luxury cars, serve as the exemplars of success. Others spend their lives along the chasm of desperation.
Sein Kyi took a completely different path. He worked two jobs, pedaled around Lawrence on a ramshackle three-speed bike, wore cast-off clothing, and collected bottles and cans to help pay the rent on his decrepit apartment.
And yet, those who know him say he was richer and happier than almost anyone they've ever met.
He was a poet, a modern-day bard who would routinely read his favorite stanzas to homeless men gathered under the Central Bridge. Each day, he would load his old bicycle up with the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune and chug merrily along his route. After that, he'd head to the Frank C. Meyer factory, where he'd keep the building clean on the 3 to 11 shift.
But that was the least of his jobs. Day in, day out, he'd arrive at work with pictures that he had drawn to accompany his poems. Sometimes he'd bring along props, like canes and stuffed animals. All the burly factory workers, mostly Hispanic immigrants, would gather around as he read and entertained.
''Everyone enjoyed it,'' said Douglas Clarke, his boss at the factory. ''He just didn't care what people thought. He loved poetry, and he wanted to share it with everyone.''
What no one knew is that he had siblings in America, a pair of doctors and an engineer, successful immigrants who had fulfilled the American dream. But he never asked for their help. ''He did not care about anything material,'' said Vicky Ong, his younger sister. ''He didn't care about money. Whatever he made, he sent it to Burma. He lived a very simple life.''
One winter afternoon, as the men at the factory gabbed about the extraordinary fact that Sein was not at work, someone burst in and yelled that he was lying on the ground down the street. By the time they got there, the ambulance had come and gone and only his toppled bike remained. When they called the hospital, doctors said he had suffered a heart attack and had died. The local paper gave his death just a brief mention -- long enough, though, to misspell his name and assign him the wrong nationality. It didn't look like an important story, and in the whole scheme of things, maybe it wasn't.
But there are bookstore managers and factory workers and homeless men touched by Sein in ways wise and wonderful. He gave them something very few others ever will. He gave them poetry.