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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.
John F. Deane

John F. Deane

(Ierland, 1943)

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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

Sponsors
Gemeente Rotterdam
Nederlands Letterenfonds
Stichting Van Beuningen Peterich-fonds
Prins Bernhard cultuurfonds
Lira fonds
Versopolis
J.E. Jurriaanse
Gefinancierd door de Europese Unie
Elise Mathilde Fonds
Stichting Verzameling van Wijngaarden-Boot
Veerhuis
VDM
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère