Marginalia

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
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 scribblings.

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."

--Billy Collins

Harsh Visions For Such Youth

Harsh visions for such youth to witness. 

Harsh tones cutting through the static air, thunderous waves resounding all around.
Harsh approaches flung all about, heightening the exponential tension.
Harsh animosity pitched to the other, not wanting to harbor such violent emotion, but at a loss for any rational expression.
O! that fine line between such passionate human emotion
That no one seems to understand ‘til found dancing precariously along its edges
Waiting for a mere gust of decision or happenstance to flick them to either side. 

(A poem I did for my English class in the style of Walt Whitman.)

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

--Walt Whitman

["Some keep the Sabbath going to Church"]

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church -
I keep it, staying at Home -
With a Bobolink for a Chorister -
And an Orchard, for a Dome -

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice -
I, just wear my Wings -
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton - sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman -
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last -
I'm going, all along.

--Emily Dickinson

Forgetfulness

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 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.

--Billy Collins

A Shropshire Lad II: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

--A.E. Housman

At Navajo Monument Valley Tribal School

the football field rises
to meet the mesa. Indian boys
gallop across the grass, against

the beginnings of their body.
On those Saturday afternoons,
unbroken horses gather to watch

their sons growing larger
in the small parts of the world.
Everyone is the quarterback.

There is no thin man in a big hat
writing down all the names
in two columns: winners and losers.

This is the eternal football game,
Indians versus Indians. All the Skins
in the wooden bleachers fancydancing,

stomping red dust straight down
into nothing. Before the game is over,
the eight-grade girls' track team

comes running, circling the field,
their thin and brown legs echoing
wild horses, wild horses, wild horses.

--Sherman Alexie

A Barred Owl

The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl's voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
"Who cooks for you?" and then "Who cooks for you?"

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

--Richard Wilbur (1992)

The History Teacher

Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

--Billy Collins (2002)

The Fury of Aerial Bombardment

You would think the fury of aerial bombardment
Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces
Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces.
History, even, does not know what is meant.

You would feel that after so many centuries
God would give man to repent; yet he can kill
As Cain could, but with multitudinous will,
No farther advanced than in his ancient furies

Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?
Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all?
Is the eternal truth man's fighting soul
Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity?

Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill,
Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.

--Richard Eberhart (1944)

Auto Wreck

Its quick soft silver bell beating, beating
And down the dark one ruby flare
Pulsing out red light like an artery,
The ambulance at top speed floating down
Past beacons and illuminated clocks
Wings in a heavy curve, dips down,
And brakes speed, entering the crowd.
The doors leap open, emptying light;
Stretchers are laid out, the mangled lifted
And stowed into the little hospital.
Then the bell, breaking the hush, tolls once,
And the ambulance with its terrible cargo
Rocking, slightly rocking, moves away,
As the doors, an afterthought, are closed.
We are deranged, walking among the cops
Who sweep glass and are large and composed.
One is still making notes under the light.
One with a bucket douches ponds of blood
Into the street and gutter.
One hangs lanterns on the wrecks that cling,
Empty husks of locusts, to iron poles.

Our throats were tight as tourniquets,
Our feet were bound with splints, but now,
Like convalescents intimate and gauche,
We speak through sickly smiles and warn
With the stubborn saw of common sense,
The grim joke and the banal resolution.
The traffic moves around with care,
But we remain, touching a wound
That opens to our richest horror.
Already old, the question, Who shall die?
Becomes unspoken, Who is innocent?
For death in war is done by hands;
Suicide has cause and stillbirth, logic;
And cancer, simple as a flower, blooms.
But this invites the occult mind,
Cancels our physics with a sneer,
And spatters all we knew of denoument
Across the expedient and wicked stones.

--Karl Shapiro (1942)

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. 
       It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
       It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
       And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
       And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 

And for all this, nature is never spent;
       There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
       Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs ---
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
       World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. 

--Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877)

Poetry

I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there's a pair of us --- don't tell! They'd banish us, you know. 
How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!
--Emily Dickinson

To fight aloud is very brave,

But gallenter, I know, 

Who charge within the bosom, 

The cavalry of woe.

Who win, and nations do not see, 

Who fall, and none observe, 

Whose dying eyes no country

Regards with patriot love. 

We trust, in plumed procession, 

For such the angels go, 

Rank after rank, with even feet

And uniforms of snow. 

--Emily Dickinson

Pain has an element of blank; It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A day when it was not. 
It has no future but itself, Its infinite realms contain Its past, enlightened to perceive New periods of pain. --Emily Dickinson

The soul selects her own society, Then shuts the door; On her divine majority Obtrude no more.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot's pausing At her low gate;Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling Upon her mat.
I've known her from an ample nation Choose one;Then close the valves of her attention Like stone.
--Emily Dickinson

The Pool Players.

Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We 

Strike straight. We 

Sing sin. We 

Thin gin. We 

Jazz June. We 

Die soon. 

--Gwendolyn Brooks

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. 

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery. 

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. 

--John Donne

When I was one-and-twenty

I heard a wise man say,

"Give crowns and pounds and guineas

But not your heart away;

Give pearls away and rubies

But keep your fancy free."

But I was one-and-twenty,

No use to talk to me. 

When I was one-and-twenty

I heard him say again, 

"The heart out of the bosom

Was never given in vain;

'Tis paid with sighs a plenty 

And sold for endless rue."

And I am two-and-twenty, 

And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

--A.E. Housman

She even thinks that up in heaven

Her class lies late and snores

While poor black cherubs rise at seven

To do celestial chores. 

--Countee Cullen

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death;

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans 

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother;s countenance

Could not unfrown itself. 

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt, 

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt. 

--Theodore Roethke

I like to see it lap the Miles --

And lick the Valleys up --

And stop to feed itself at Tanks --

And then -- prodigious step

Around a Pile of Mountains --

And supercilious peer

In Shanties -- by the sides of Roads --

And then a Quarry pare

To fit its Ribs

And crawl between

Complaining all the while 

In horrid -- hooting stanza --

Then chase itself down Hill --

And neigh like Boanerges --

Then -- punctual as a Star

Stop -- docile and omnipotent

At its own stable door --

--Emily Dickinson

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. 

It promises light

like the careful undressing of love. 

Here.

It will blind you with tears

like a lover.

It will make your reflection 

a wobbling photo of grief. 

I am trying to be truthful. 

Not a cute card or a kissogram. 

I give you an onion. 

Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,

possessive and faithful

as we are,

for as long as we are.

Take it. 

Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring, 

if you like. 

Lethal. 

Its scent will cling to your fingers, cling to your knife. 

--Carol Ann Duffy

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript

Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn. 

When evening quickens faintly in the street, 

Wakening the appetites of life in some

And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript, 

I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning

Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,

If the street were time and he at the end of the street,

And I say, "Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript." 

--T.S. Eliot

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say

The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,

Men reckon what it did, and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres, 

Though greater far, is innocent. 

Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it. 

But we by a love so much refined,

That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion, 

Like gold to airy thinness beat. 

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the other do. 

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam, 

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home. 

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 

Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun. 

--John Donne

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
--William Wordsworth

I tend the mobile now

like an injured bird

We text, text, text

our significant words.

I re-read your first,

your second, your third,

look for your small xx,

feeling absurd.

The codes we send

arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,

their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press

will ever be heard.

--Carol Ann Duffy

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the 

                            flow of human blood in human veins. 

My soul has grown deep like the rivers. 

I bathed in Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. 

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. 

I heard the signing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

                            went down to New Orleands, and I've seen its

                            muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers. 

--Langston Hughes

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and share's man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. 

--Gerard Manley Hopkins 

Much Madness is divinest Sense -

To a discerning Eye -

Much Sense - the starkest Madness -

'Tis the Majority

In this, as all, prevail -

Assent - and you are sane - 

Demur - you're sraightway dangerous -

And handled with a Chain -

--Emily Dickinson

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha'n't be gone long. -You come too. 

I'm going out to fetch the little calf

That's standing by the mother. It's so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue. 

I sha'n't be gone long. -You come too. 

--Robert Frost

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors --

No -- yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, 

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever -- or else swoon to death. 

--John Keats

You can thank my English teacher for this post. We're doing a poetry unit in AP Literature, and I'm just loving it! Poetry really is so beautiful. I wish I could write it well. 

Enjoy!

--Sadie

Paranoia or Precaution

Is the door locked?
Locked.
Double check.
Locked.
Walk across the room.
Check the second door.
Locked.
Both locks secure?
Locked.
A shorter walk this time.
Check both locks.
Locked.
A glance at all three doors.
Make sure nothing was missed.
Still locked.
A short nod.
A deep breath.
Now I can relax.

Every time the doorbell rings,
Every time someone knocks.
There's always that slight panic,
My mind wondering if it's occurring again,
Listening for that doorknob to jiggle back and forth.
Of course, hopefully nothing like that
Will ever happen again,
But the mind still likes to remind you
Of all the possibilities.
It never hurts to be extra safe.
It always takes time to recover
From an incident that occurred almost a year ago.
You don't blame her.
You're glad she's getting help.
But you're still afraid it may happen again.

Are all the windows locked?
Locked.
But wait.
That one night,
When you cracked your window open for a slight breeze...
I check again.
Locked.
A sigh of relief.
Now I can relax.