Mind of Winter

Limerick (III)

from Generic Literature by Steve White

There once was an X from place B
That satisfied predicate P
He or she did thing A
In an adjective way
Resulting in circumstance C

Maybe my brain is not functioning entirely properly, being three days from freedom, but I found this poem to be rather fun. There’s some more good generic stuff at Mr. White’s website.

Jon pointed me years ago to this nearly perfect poem by A.E. Houseman:

by A.E. Houseman

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

I have been reflecting on this very deep poem and, last night, composed an essay of sorts:

Life is nothing much to lose. Who says this? Who could say such a thing? The voice of the poem couldn’t be the young man who was the living first person referred to in the first line. The one who lies and the one who did not choose to live. That man believes that life is something much to lose. The voice speaking the lines must be very old. Either old in the old familiar way of years– old enough to be ready to let life go without going to pieces – or old as the universe, so that the extinguishing of life really seems like nothing.

Can one learn to not hate death? Can one come to say that life is nothing much to lose since ‘life’ is what is left of life, not what has been lived? A young man sees the worth of living in the potential of living. Who will I marry? What will my kids be like? What shape will my career take? How will I gain notoriety? What will I learn? What experiences will I live through? What hills will I climb? The life left for a man entering his prime is surely something indeed to lose – from his own perspective at least. Can one live enough to change this perspective?

I have had some wonderful things occur in my life. I went to St. John’s. I made great friendships. I met my wife, Heidi, and have lived two wonderful years, growing into marriage with her. Is life getting to be less and less ‘something much to lose’ as these attainments of satisfaction pass behind me? We do speak of an old man or woman as having ‘had their life,’ and it is common sense ethics to side with the preservation of the young for whom ‘so much lies ahead.’ An old man might say ‘life is nothing much to lose’ – but only if he means his life.

What of this ‘to be sure?’ To whom is the voice of the poem speaking? Who is in on this conspiracy with the speaker? Who shares with him such a clear and distinct presupposition that life in nothing much to lose? It sounds like is a person trying to persuade through intimidation. “Surely,” he says, “you know!” “Surely you are not one to think that life is something indeed to lose!” This is not, it seems, simply the perspective of an old person who has lived enough to be philosophical about death. Rather it is the voice of one who has grown into cynicism of the most severe kind. He has come to know that life (not just his life) is nothing much to lose.

When did the man who has died young get so old as to enter into this cynical circle of embittered age? Is he simply aged or is he, perhaps, much older than the ones who have lived long enough to accept death? He has crossed death’s threshold and is speaking from the other side. Perhaps we should take his voice, then, to be one that can not be modeled by the perspective of any earthly creatures. His ‘to be sure’ is not a nudge-nudge for fellow cynics or a bullying of the hopeful. Rather it is a voice of authority from a place where agelessness comes with the territory. Life – make no mistake about it – is nothing much to lose.

Let’s back up though. ‘Here dead lie we…’ Why is this ‘we’ and not ‘I’? It is the ‘we’ of a soldier. The voice is not an individual’s but that of a collective, content to speak from the grave in unison. The whole battalion speaks as one, as they might in declaiming their oath of obedience or their pledge. Is this poem approachable by one like me who has never put himself in the position of risk that these speakers have?

‘Here dead lie we because we did not choose’ – the sentence could end here and, indeed, in my ear, it always does for a moment. The sense is ‘we did not choose and so we are dead.’ The implication is ‘we did not choose to die.’ But this is exactly the opposite of what is being said. “To choose” can be intransitive (I did not make a choice – I did not choose) or transitive (I did not choose cherry over rhubarb; I did not choose to come see you this night). The moment at the end of the first line is an indirection, added to by the twisted syntax of the first words – as if for a moment the voice of the poem wants you to hear – ‘we did not choose – so here we lie.’

But the verb phrase is only half complete at the enjambment. ‘We did not choose… to live.’ We did not choose the path that meant certain continuation of our life. I stop short of saying ‘we did not choose to live.’ Of course we chose to live. But choosing can be the reaching out for a good or the willful evasion of an evil. This seems to be the latter. ‘we did not choose to live and (by living—by having chosen to guarantee our living) shame the land from which we sprung. Can we find a positive choice in this formulation of what we did not choose? Did ‘we’ (the voice) choose to fight for the exhilaration of being young and in action? For the experience of something as new as skating on the edge of death? Did we choose to fight for the pride we felt or the pride we anticipated from praise we would receive? Likely all these, but the voice of them poem only tells us ‘we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung.’ We fought for fear of the shame (wrong) of not fighting.

Have we widened the scope of ‘we’ enough? Could the ‘we’ voicing this poem be more than the soldiers whose corpse(s) lie(s) beneath the stone with these words on it? We all, we as parents, friends, human beings, have made a choice to fight one another. Or we have had this choice thrust on us (because we did not choose). It is hard to say which is right. But we have died with the young who have died. We have lost our next generation, our replenishment of everyday, aging men with jobs and opinions. Here dead lies a part of us, of our body politic, our community. Because we are who we are we must die – and out of our natural season, but perennially nonetheless.

‘But young men think it is,’ Young men do indeed. All men do. But here at this moment of the poem, we are still entranced by the ‘to be sure.’ We are reassured by it – young men lie in the ground, how could we not be glad to think that life is nothing much to lose. It is the seduction of nihilism, perhaps, but it is a warm bed to lie in. So, at the comma in the last line we disdain the foolishness together with this voice of timeless (and soulless) wisdom. But we pay for it at the conclusion – ‘and we were young.’ Because, of course, nothing matters but how it seems to the man who crossed the threshold. Life could not be nothing much to lose if he thought it was something, indeed. Youth, with its stake in possibility, can not hand over its gifts without remorse. Youth can not think of ‘life’ in the face of death. Only my life. Our life.

Jenny Kissed Me

by Leigh Hunt

Jenny kissed me when we met,
  Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
  Sweets into your list, put that in.
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
  Say that health and wealth have missed me;
Say I’m growing old, but add—
  Jenny kissed me!

Dearest Cynara, I have broken faith; come what may, life is beautiful today.

I had the greatest lexicographic moment of my life when I looked up the word ‘cromlech’ after reading this poem.

The Cromlech

by Louis MacNeice

From trivia of froth and pollen
White tufts in the rabbit warren
And every minute like a thicket
Nicked and dropped, nicked and dropped,
Extracters and abstracters ask
What emerges, what survives,
And once the stopper is unstopped
What was the essence in the flask
and what is Life apart from lives
And where, apart from fact, the value

To which we answer, being naive,
Wearing the world upon our sleeve,
That to dissect a given thing
Unravelling its complexity
Outrages its simplicity
For essence is not merely core
And each event implies the world,
A centre needs periphery.

This being so, at times at least
Granted the sympathetic pulse
And granted the perceiving eye
Each pregnant with a history,
Appearance and appearances –
In spite of the philosophers
With their jejune dichotomies –
Can be at times reality.

So Tom and Tessy holding hands
(Dare an abstraction steal a kiss?)
Cannot be generalized away,
Reduced by bleak analysis
To pointers demonstrating laws
Which drain the colour from the day;
Not mere effects of a crude cause
But of themselves significant,
To run-of-brain recalcitrant,
This that they are and do is This…

Tom is here, Tessy is here
At this point in a given year
With all this hour’s accessories,
A given glory – and to look
That gift-horse in the mouth will prove
Or disprove nothing of their love
Which is as sure intact a fact,
Though young and supple, as what stands
Obtuse and old, in time congealed,
Behind them as they mingle hands –
Self-contained, unexplained,
The cromlech in the clover field.

The other day, I decided to try my hand at composing a more modern piece of poetry, but the results were dismal:

A Meta-Analysis of Free Verse in Free Verse
or
Ode on Itself

by Michael Hoke

Imagine
    how beautiful
    this poem could have been
    had you but written it
Yourself

I was struck today, however, when I read a review of Billy Collins’ newest book in the NYT [registration may be required]. It turns out that Collins’ book begins with a poem that starts thusly:

from The Trouble with Poetry

by Billy Collins

I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you

I wrote my piece having Billy Collins particularly in mind, though I did not mean it to be an homage or an imitation, strictly speaking. I haven’t read the rest of the Collins poem, but just looking at the first stanza, I like mine better. [Some less than friendly discussion of the NYT review may be found at MetaFilter.]

Also, I tried to compose a pwoermd today:

by Michael Hoke

VISUALEYES

…but it turns out someone beat me to it.

I think I’m giving up my career ambitions in poetry. I’ll stick to law school.

I am a huge fan of MacNeice now. Read this poem out loud. He is a poet who has such a mastery over sounds that I often care very little about his themes - though they are nothing to sneeze at, either. (It is almost embarrasing to love a poem so much that has “sunshine” in the title.)

Spring Sunshine

by Louis MacNeice

In a between world, a world of amber,
The old cat, on the sand-warm window-sill
Sleeps on the verge of nullity.

Spring sunshine has a quality
Transcending rooks and the hammerings
Of those who hang new pictures,
Asking if it is worth it
To clamour and caw, to add stick to stick for ever.

If it is worth while really
To colonize any more the already populous
Tree of knowledge, to portion and reportion
Bits of broken knowledge brittle and dead,
Whether it would not be better
To hide one’s head in the warm sand of sleep
And be buried without hustle or bother.

The rooks bicker heckle bargain always
And market carts lumber–
Let me, in the calm of the all-humouring sun
Also indulge my humour
And bury myself beyond creaks and cawings
In a below world, a bottom world of amber.

By far the most impressive part of this, for me, are the lines: The rooks bicker heckle bargain always/And market carts lumber–

Never mind the long silence, I have enjoyed Hoke’s posts and thoughts on Nietzsche. I plan to take some time with him and his solitudes and renunciations.

I have recently been spending some evenings with a fine poet named Warren Carrier, father of Wintry-Minded Ethan. Conversations with him have inspired me to try again to memorize poems - an effort that I was rather serious about for a time right after graduating St. Johns. My plan is to memorize one from each poet who I admire. Perhaps, as my view of each poet changes, I will switch to a new poem of theirs… Plans, plans, treacherous plans.

I want to post two poems to commemorate my new resolve. One from Warren (which I have not yet tried to memorize) and one from Louis MacNeice, which I have. I’ll post the MacNeice separately in case anyone wants to comment on one poem and not the other.

Postcard

by Warren Carrier

He gazed beyond the rocky edge where turning
maples stretched for miles, particulars
of his mind, a village, a white spire.
Above the turquoise atmosphere, an unseen
gravity held all light within itself,
burst like a melon, scattering galaxies.
He thought of the momentary hues of maples,
of human generations, the same, and never
the same, of randomness, of order as change.
The black that cracked into its separate stars,
bloomed from bent and distant light, had come
to this: himself here, gazing and musing,
maples the tint of the sun, a village of beings
unseen under leaves, their immaculate spire.

Words uttered by Heidi after she has begrudgingly agreed to lend her husband a pen:

Goodbye noble pen! Ah me, your purchase was bitterness!
Why did I, with such dutiful care, select you from among
the many inscribers of ink that rested in their caps
upon the shelf? If only you could live out your days until
the last drop of black liquid were delicately applied
to the fragile pages, being a delight to your caretaker,
unmatched in your value for the setting down of thoughts
in sweet correspondence and the making of lists.
Now it has befallen that your life must be brief and bitter.
Never again shall you return to the drawer of your fathers
to lie beside the sharpies and rulers and staples in good order.
Rather will you be misplaced and disregarded, dispersed
into the darkness of your own ink as so many pens
less effective than you have been before.

I recently sent the following email:

This is just to say
I have put the program
organdon_input.sas
into the directory
U:\TIS-Access\SAS Programs\HRSA Grant
and modified the program to use the file
All Surveys - Round One.txt
in the same directory.

And then I thought of Jon.

And then I thought of Hoke.

And then I thought of this:

I have deleted
the data
that were in
the shared drive

and which
you were probably
saving
for analysis.

Forgive me–
with a single command,
so many ones
become zeroes.

And so I thought I’d share it.

from Rococo

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Remembrance may recover
And time bring back to time
The name of your first lover,
The ring of my first rhyme;
But rose-leaves of December
The frosts of June shall fret,
The day that you remember,
The day that I forget.

Some weeks ago Alan posted a pair of poems pertaining to obliscence. I meant to say something about these when they were first posted, but I *ahem* forgot. Just over a month ago I turned old, so the workings and the failings of memory have featured prominently in my recent ruminations. I have also been somewhat more casually contemplating the operation of memory and the rôle of forgetfulness for some time, so I certainly appreciated his posting these two poems.
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aesop revised by archy

by Don Marquis

a wolf met a spring
lamb drinking
at a stream
and said to her
you are the lamb
that muddied this stream
all last year
so that i could not get
a clean fresh drink
i am resolved that
this outrage
shall not be enacted again
this season i am going
to kill you
just a minute said the lamb
i was not born last
year so it could not
have been i
the wolf then pulled
a number of other
arguments as to why the lamb
should die
but in each case the lamb
pretty innocent that she was
easily proved
herself guiltless
well well said the wolf
enough of that argument
you are right and i am wrong
but i am going to eat
you anyhow
because i am hungry
stop exclamation point
cried a human voice
and a man came over
the slope of the ravine
vile lupine marauder
you shall not kill that
beautiful and innocent
lamb for i shall save her
exit the wolf
left upper exit
snarling
poor little lamb
continued our human hero
sweet tender little thing
it is well that i appeared
just when i did
it makes my blood boil
to think of the fright
to which you have been
subjected in another
moment i would have been
too late come home with me
and the lamb frolicked
about her new found friend
gambolling as to the sound
of a wordsworthian tabor
and leaping for joy
as if propelled by a stanza
from william blake
these vile and bloody wolves
went on our hero
in honest indignation
they must be cleared out
of the country
the meads must be made safe
for sheepocracy
and so jollying her along
with the usual human hokum
he led her to his home
and the son of a gun
did not even blush when
they passed the mint bed
gently he cut her throat
all the while inveighing
against the inhuman wolf
and tenderly he cooked her
and lovingly he sauced her
and meltingly he ate her
and piously he said a grace
thanking his gods
for their bountiful gifts to him
and after dinner
he sat with his pipe
before the fire meditating
on the brutality of wolves
and the injustice of
the universe
which allows them to harry
poor innocent lambs
and wondering if he
had not better
write to the paper
for as he said
for god s sake can t
something be done about
it
     archy

I figured I had to post something. This one has great phrasing combined with a pitch perfect point on politics and morality. And it’s fun to boot.

For You, Who Didn’t Know

by Nancy Willard

At four A.M. I dreamed myself on that beach
where we’ll take you after you’re born.
I woke in a wave of blood.

Lying in the back seat of a nervous Chevy
I counted the traffic lights, lonely as planets.
Starlings stirred in the robes of Justice

over the Town Hall. Miscarriage of justice,
they sang, while you, my small client,
went curling away like smoke under my ribs.

Kick me! I pleaded. Give me a sign
that you’re still there!
Train tracks shook our flesh from our bones.

Behind the hospital rose a tree of heaven.
   You can learn something from everything,
   a rabbi told his Hasidim who did not believe it.

   I didn’t believe it, either. O rabbi,
   What did you learn on the train to Belsen?
   That because of one second one can miss everything.

There are rooms on this earth for emergencies.
A sleepy attendant steals my clothes and my name,
and leaves me among the sinks on an altar of fear.

“Your name. Your name. Sign these papers,
authorizing us in our wisdom to save the child.
Sign here for circumcision. Your faith, your faith.”

   O rabbi, what can we learn from the telegraph?
   asked the Hasidim, who did not understand.
   And he answered, That every word is counted and charged.

“This is called a dobtone,” smiles the doctor.
He greases my belly, stretched like a drum,
and plants a microphone there, like a flag.

A thousand thumping rabbits! Savages clapping for joy!
A heart dancing its name, I’m-here, I’m-here!
The cries of fishes, of stars, the tunings of hair!

   O rabbi, what can we learn from the telephone?
   My shiksa daughter, your faith, your faith
   that what we say here is heard there.

Every time I come back to this poem, there is more there. Let me just point out that the three interjections about the rabbi are quite artfully placed. First, as she speeds to the hospital she considers what can be lost if they lose any time, stopping at the lights, as it is only just for a citizen to do. Then, as she signs papers that she can’t possibly be in a state to understand the meaning of and that could mean her own or the child’s life or death she considers the real significance of words, when put in certain context — as in a contract. Finally, in her relief at the end of the ordeal she considers the power of prayer, believing (for the moment anyway) that what is said here is heard there.

Lee and I have discussed how hard it is to memorize the lines or pieces of ‘free verse’ poems, even the best ones. But I have had those three interjections of the rabbi in my head for days now — in the phrasing that the poet delivers them.

To My Big Nose

from ‘Luck Is Luck’

by Lucia Perillo

Hard to believe there were actual years
when I planned to have you cut from my face—
hard to imagine what the world would have looked like
if not seen through your pink shadow.
You who are built from random parts
like a mythical creature—a gryphon or sphinx—
with the cartilage ball attached to your tip
and the plaque where the bone flares at the bridge
like a snake who has swallowed a small coin.
Seabird beak or tanker prow
with Modigliani nostrils, like those strolled out
from the dank studio and its close air,
with a swish-swish whisper from the model’s silk robe
as it parts and then falls shut again.
Then you’re out on the sidewalk of Montparnasse
with its fumes of tulips and clotted cream
and clotted lungs and cigars and sewers—
even fumes from the lobster who walks on a leash.
And did his owner march slowly
or drag his swimmerets briskly along
through the one man’s Parisian dogturd that is
the other man’s cutting-edge conceptual art?
So long twentieth century, my Pygmalion.
So long rhinoplasty and the tummy tuck.
Let the vowels squeak through my sinuses
like wet sheets hauled on a laundry line’s rusty wheels.
Oh I am not so dumb as people have made me out,
what with your detours when I speak,
and you are not so cruel, though you frightened men off
all those years when I thought I was running the show,
pale ghost who has led me like a knife
continually slicing the future stepped into,
oh rudder/wing flap/daggerboard, my whole life
turning me this way and that.

I think this poem is intended to be a sardonic ode to conceptual art and societal expectations about beauty. That is, a sort of kiss-off to the idea of turning up your nose (so to speak) at prejudgment or close-mindedness. But I fear that it is actually a poem about beauty being subjective - that she is now beyond the ugliness of her nose because it is that nose that (in part) defines her perspective on the world. I say “fear” because I would hope a poet would have something more to say than that beauty is in the nose of the beholder. But, I suppose this could just be my blessed rage for order talking here.

Oh, but I forget to mention that I think her images are great. This is really why I put it here.

Six other poems from ‘Luck is Luck’ can be read on the NYT review site.

[add: I just re-read what I wrote and it makes no sense. Just read the poem. 4:22 PM]

Here are two poems on a related theme. If I have already put up the Bishop poem before, I apologize. First, Billy Collins:

Forgetfulness

by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Now, Elizabeth Bishop:

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Brian’s post about the early bird, lovely post that it was, left a small, very nasal fly inside my head who has been buzzing away, demanding a good swatting. This little essay is meant to be a rolled up piece of paper with which to do away with him.

Brian began by pointing out that metaphors are mortal. He then went on to talk about ‘proverbs’ – “lockets with fossils inside” – a suggestion that they die too. I think perhaps Brian was conflating two things here that can be teased apart. Thus the fly.

My question then— Metaphors die, do proverbs?
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The Sweeper of Ways

by Howard Nemerov

All day, a small mild Negro man with a broom
Sweeps up the leaves that fall along the paths.
He carries his head to one side, looking down
At his leaves, at his broom like a windy beard
Curled with the sweeping habit. Over him
High haughty trees, the hickory and the ash,
Dispense their more leaves easily, or else
The district wind, hunting hypocrisy,
Tears at the summer’s wall and throws down leaves
To witness of a truth naked and cold.

Hopeless it looks, on these harsh, hastening days
Before the end, to finish all those leaves
Against time. But the broom goes back and forth
With a tree’s patience, as though naturally
Erasers would speak the language of pencils.
A thousand thoughts fall on the same blank page,
Though the wind blows them back, they go where he
Directs them, to the archives where disorder
Blazes and a pale smoke becomes the sky.
The ways I walk are splendidly free of leaves.

We meet, we smile good morning, say the weather
Whatever. On a rainy day there’ll be
A few leaves stuck like emblems on the walk;
These too he brooms at till they come unstuck.
Masters, we carry our white faces by
In silent prayer, Don’t hate me, on a wave-
length which his broom’s antennae perfectly
Pick up, we know ourselves so many thoughts
Considered by a careful, kindly mind
Which can do nothing, and is doing that.

I would really like to hear any thoughts people have about this poem, which strikes me more and more each time I read it. Something is most certainly standing for something else here, I would say. But it is not in the way that I have grown accustomed to with Mr. Kooser– where the two ends of the analogy are made quite obvious and it is the striking likeness of them that lends power to the poem. Here, the poet poses more of a puzzle.

I feel pretty certain that this poem is about how I felt often at college watching the parade of nameless black folks cook for and clean up after white students (well, nameless outside of the gym– a credit to the sports program of St. John’s for sure). And how I feel at work now with Hispanic employees doing most of the same thing. There is one woman in particular… she cleans the bathrooms on the floor where my office is. I visit the bathroom a lot. She wears a lot of makeup and is fat. She cleans the bathroom twice a day during the hours I am there. Of course she has to wait outside the door of the men’s room, blocking the entrance, while the people doing business inside finish and come out. I’m not sure how she knows that it is all clear. Maybe they tell her to wait X amount of time and then go in. In any case, I think about her waiting there outside the room nodding to men like me as we come out of the bathroom, an awkward moment for sure. Need I point out that its a little sad and that I do– in a way– pray she doesn’t hate me?

But in this poem the sweeper is given a lot of dignity. To me he seems like the prophet in common clothes; Knight of infinite resignation, maybe. And why so much lingering in the poem on the sweeping, the leaves, trees, wet leaves? This is what stands for something I feel. But I can’t sort out what. With the line “The ways I walk are splendidly free of leaves” I start to feel certain that a clean walkway is a semblance of justice– an appearance that things are acceptable as they are, though the way is never and never can be finally free of leaves. There is more to expose, I think, in this analogy.

Marginalia

by Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor 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 the 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 of 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, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have 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^o
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing 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 loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking 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.”

For whatever reason, this reminds me of Hoke.

I can recall only one margin note I ever came across in a library book. It was in a section of Plato’s Republic dealing with what sort of poetry makes noble citizens and such claptrap. One of my predecessors had noted beside one of these proposals “then Homer becomes Herodotus”.

I don’t believe I have ever scribbled in a book I didn’t own. I have managed to mark up a few texts, but almost exclusively with asterisks, brackets, and question marks. I tried underlining with Hegel. It did not go well. I did, however, at least once manage to delve into actual notes. My copy of the Meno has “Knowledge as Easter Egg Hunt” scribbled in the margin.

Happy Easter.

Out of curiosity, what became of the ability to create new categories? It seems to me that Billy Collins could use one.

Pinup

by Billy Collins

The murkiness of the local garage is not so dense
That you cannot make out the calendar of pinup
Drawings on the wall above a bench of tools.
Your ears are ringing with the sound of
The mechanic hammering on your exhaust pipe,
And as you look closer you notice that this month’s
Is not the one pushing the lawn mower, wearing
a straw hat and very short blue shorts,
her shirt tied in a knot just below her breasts.
Nor is it the one in the admiral’s cap, bending
Forward, resting her hands on a wharf piling,
Glancing over the tiny anchors on her shoulders.
No, this is March, the month of great winds,
So appropriately it is the one walking her dog
Along a city sidewalk on a very blustery day.
One hand is busy keeping her hat down on her head
And the other is grasping the little dog’s leash,
So of course there is no hand left to push down
Her dress which is billowing up around her waist
Exposing her long stockinged legs and yes the secret
Apparatus of her garter belt. Needless to say,
In the confusion of wind and excited dog
The leash has wrapped itself around her ankles
Several times giving her a rather bridled
And helpless appearance which is added to
By the impossibly high heels she is teetering on.
You would like to come to her rescue,
Gather up the little dog in your arms,
Untangle the leash, lead her to safety,
And receiver her bottomless gratitude, but
The mechanic is calling you over to look
At something under your car. It seems that he has
Run into a problem and the job is going
To cost more than he had said and take
Much longer than he had thought.
Well, it can’t be helped, you hear yourself say
As you return to your place by the workbench,
Knowing that as soon as the hammering resumes
You will slowly lift the bottom of the calendar
Just enough to reveal a glimpse of what
The future holds in store: ah,
The red polka-dot umbrella of April and her
Upturned palm extended coyly into the rain.

A Life

by Howard Nemerov

Innocence?
In a sense.
In no sense!

Was that it?
Was that it?
Was that it?

That was it.

Monday Morning

by Billy Collins

The complacency of this student, late
for the final, who chews her pen for an hour,
who sits in her sunny chair,
with a container of coffee and an orange,
a cockatoo swinging freely in her green mind
as if on some drug dissolved,
mingling to give her a wholly ancient rush.
She dreams a little and she fears the mark
she might well get–a catastrophe–
as a frown darkens the hauteur of her light brow.
The orange peels and her bright senior ring
make her think of some procession of classmates,
walking across the wide campus, without a sound,
stalled for the passing of her sneakered feet
over the lawn, to silent pals and steins,
dorm of nobody who would bother to pull an A or care.