In The Margins

In The Margins

In The Margins

The day he reached, furtively,
into his inside pocket and showed me

my poem cut from the newspaper, was the day
I knew I loved him. I remembered

watching him in the brown-dark, stuffy office,
there by the seaweed reaches of Achill Sound,

while his pen scratched uneasily across
official forms, though his mind, I knew,

was on the rocks beyond Purteen
where the mackerel shoaled, where the seal

lifted its head heavy with water-wisdom
to take him in. When he finished with the form

he laid aside the pen, held a match
to a stump of red wax, as if he signed

some easy-going labourer’s doom with a drop
of his own blood. At home, in the margins

of his books – Gorky, Goethe, Proust –
his notes and exclamations trailed and turned

like the irascible and business-like marking out
of ants in their tasks and turns; and always

in the breast pocket of his jacket, two pens
visible, the plump and easy-tempered

fountain pen and the biro, slim-fit, quick to the threads
of the imagination. To whom I owe the steady

application to the word, the flourished signing of my name,
as if I had captured some quick creature in the net.