Margins

Margins


Comments scribbled in the margins
defacing (some suggest) the pages
in hundred-and-fifty-some-year-old volumes
of Dickens or Poe, of Whitman and Donne,
entire passages underlined or (gasp) highlighted
in whatever color was handy mean more to me
than some intrinsic monetary value
assigned a book I'd never part with,
let alone sell, anyway.

I like to think of them
as an ongoing conversation
across time, a giving and taking
of ideas, reactions, and an appreciation
or commentary: a meeting,
perhaps, between minds and times
writer to writer, poet to poet--and more--
reader to reader. For their words were
never written into the void.