Gedicht
John F. Deane
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.
© 2012, John F. Deane
Publisher: First published on PIW,
Publisher: First published on PIW,
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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.
In The Margins
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