a poem seymour g. would have written at age 2


Subject: a poem seymour g. would have written at age 2
From: chomi cat (ncp87@postmark.net)
Date: Fri Mar 09 2001 - 23:52:32 GMT


Hi quiet friends,

I have just read a nice poem that a girl sent to a mailing list, she
was coming back from a poetry reading and this one is by Billy
Collins. The Salinger reference made me smile - I thought
some of you might like..

Nathalie

------

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishses against the author
raging along the bordersof every page
in a tiny black script.
If I could get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Connor Cruise O'Brien,
They seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive--
"Nonsense.""Please!""HA!!"--
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what a person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in _The Life of Emily Dickinson_.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs _A Modest Proposal_.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes.""Bull's-eye.""My man!"
Check marks, astericks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page--
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of _Catcher in the Rye_
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my lonliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

a few greasy smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil--
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet--
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

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