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
 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 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.”