Marginalia

Jan 10 2014

Spines stiffen
paper yellows
ink fades.

The hard-cover edition
was supposed to be permanent,
the printed word, out-live us.

Day after day
exposed to sun, collecting dust.
Its pages exhale
that old book smell
of vinegar, and must.

Used books
have been touched by human hands;

the residue of sweat,

dead skin

impressed on the page.

Before we met

you left part of yourself.
Marginalia
in red ball-point pen,
the cramped script
even you
found barely legible.
And your usual exclamation marks,

as if trying to shake some sense

into the rest of us.
When you were impossibly young,
a fresh-faced girl
out to change the world,
as if you were the first
to have tried.

A coffee stain
that passed your lips,

a dog-eared page

you folded in,
a bookmark slipping out.
Which means I’ve lost your place
in a book you never finished.
The unformed girl
who will never return,
the cynical woman
who can't.

Your words
never meant to last,
placed carefully back on the shelf.


A friend gave me a used book, and on opening it I was immediately struck by that familiar sensation: the decomposing smell of acidic paper. Although used books have character, and can be great finds, and appeal to my dislike of waste, there is also something a bit unseemly and unhygienic about them. You don't know where they've been, or who has held them, or what unpleasant surprises they might contain.

But this tactility is also the strength of a real physical book; especially in contrast with the e-book, which is forever pristine and can never contain any history. The same goes for a real letter as opposed to email: someone you loved actually touched that paper; and there is their idiosyncratic script, applied to the page by their own hand.

So this poem is about opening an old book that's been forgotten on its shelf, and of the shock of recognition: the hand-writing of someone who has gone, the intimacy of their private thought suddenly present. Instead of the vaguely distasteful feeling I got on cracking the spine of that used book, the feeling here is of bittersweet pleasure and sentimental nostalgia; as well as a melancholy reflection on impermanence and loss.

I think the woman in this poem isn't just an old flame who has gone out of his life; I think she has passed away too young. And there is a bit of foreshadowing that makes this more likely: the decrepitude of stiff spines and yellowing paper; the impermanence of a book, which we like to think would confer a kind of posterity on a writer; the molecules of dead skin. (I also had the coffee stain "interred on the page", but that line was dropped in editing.) I've been thinking lately of my old friend Dorothy, who died violently and far too young. Perhaps this was working on my subconscious as I wrote.