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

Death by Caramel Suckers

So, I have a pretty hilarious tale for you to enjoy.

When I was a little girl, probably around 3 years old or so, I fell down the stairs at my gramma's house. And this was a long flight of stairs. Like ten or more. Needless to say, I chipped my front tooth in half.

(Probably something like this but not quite as drastic.) 

I had a crown put on it so that it looked normal and I wouldn't be haunted by my missing tooth or teased by fellow classmates in the early years of elementary school. After all, that's a critical self-esteem period. One fateful Halloween, when I was around eight years old, I was sitting in the car outside my house, probably waiting for someone to get in the car (as is still an unfortunate routine my family deals with daily), I was chewing on a caramel apple sucker -- a delicacy I didn't have often. Well, the caramel got stuck on my teeth, and as was instinctual, I yanked it out of my mouth. (Hello, teeth are invincible people. *chagrined look*) Need I describe my shock when I pulled half my tooth off with it? 

(Anyone remember these beauts?) 

Completely freaked out, I went to my mom in a panic thinking I had just pulled out half of my tooth. What was I going to do? Was this normal? Of course, she explained to me that I'd fallen down the stairs as a clumsy child and that it wasn't my real tooth that I'd pulled out. Being eight years old, I felt like I'd been living with a lie. How could I not have known my tooth wasn't real? 

Well, this past week I was on tour at Disneyland, the Happiest Place on Earth, with my high school's orchestra. And one of my roommates had been given a box of treats by her father. These delicious candies called "Sugar Daddy"(s) were in that box. Of course, late at night in a room full of teenage girls, who wouldn't love to munch on some candy? 

(Curse you.)

I love caramel and I love suckers. However, the combination has proven to be quite fateful. Being a longer sucker, I got it stuck on my very last molar when in the midst of laughing I'd bitten down on the sucker. I need to learn to quit doing that. Or just avoid caramel suckers like the plague. Yanking it out, as I had ten years ago, I unknowingly chipped my tooth. *Face palm.* There was no pain, same as my first experience, and I wouldn't have even noticed if the next time I bit down, after finishing said demon candy, there hadn't been something crunchy. I thought this was odd, and spit it out into my hand. Caramel is characteristically a brown, caramel color. There was nothing pearly white in this sucker. So my tongue reached back to my tooth, and I was surprised to find that it was a little bit more rough and uneven than it had been last time I'd checked. 

"Hey guys," I said in slight nonchalant shock, "I think I just chipped my tooth." 

Of course, everyone laughed at me, myself included, and I couldn't really believe that I had actually chipped it. Obviously I should just stay away from caramel suckers. I was surprised it hadn't hurt, as were my roommates. But it's okay. It's clear back there where no one can see it, and it's just the tiny corner of my tooth. Not even noticeable. It can only bother me, until my tongue gets used to this uneven, rough spot in the back of my mouth. 

If any of you see me picking up a caramel sucker again, just laugh at me and tell me to put it down. Please. I don't want to clumsily chip another pearly white. 

Yes, you can laugh. I've laughed myself. But I feel it is my duty to warn you all about A) chewing on caramel suckers (DON'T.), and B) even hazardously picking them up and placing them in your mouth in the first place. My two chipped teeth, pieces rest in peace, advise strongly against it. 

--Chagrined Caramel Lover

Bronze Radio Return - Shake, Shake, Shake

Love this group. Please go listen to their stuff. I've just been a little bit obsessed lately, no big deal. They have a great sound and are wonderful to listen to. They always put me in a good mood.

Local Natives-Sun Hands

Great song. Just listen. And hey, check out their new album too while you're at it.

Local Natives - Who Knows Who Cares

And another favorite. You have to wait a little bit for it to get good, but it gets there, I promise.

Sorry for all the videos today. I just haven't had time to post any of them yet. So you're getting them all today. Deal with it. ;)

Metronomy - A Thing For Me

Enjoy this precious gem! It's one of the coolest songs I've heard and one of the coolest videos ever.

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)