52/312: Lately
Jan. 4th, 2026 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rejectomorphSunday afternoon I caught myself just in time to not go out to the mailbox and check for the mail that isn't delivered on Sunday. Had I not caught myself in time I probably wouldn't have been embarrassed by my foolishness, as I've grown accustomed to being a stupid old guy, but I'd have been pissed off at myself for wasting so much energy for nothing. That, after all, is what the Idernet is for.
All in all I did not enjoy Sunday. For one thing I slept poorly, and for another when I woke up I'd had a very weird dream and remembered it, which rarely happens, but then I forgot it later, which always happens. There was no more rain, but then there was no sun to speak of either, so it was dull and monotonous. I'd hoped to get some laundry done, but the laundry room was busy, so in the end all I got done was to empty the trash. Oh, and I did fix a decent dinner, but it was a bit too large and I overate, and now must pay for that, probably with a second night of poor sleep.
Rain is still scheduled for Monday, but Tuesday's has vanished from the forecast. Possible showers remain predicted for Wednesday, but after that there's a bunch of sunny but chilly days. I guess that's a good thing for anybody who got flooded by the storms, as things will dry out for the cleanup, but for the rest of us it's just a reminder of creeping drought. It's probably too soon to worry, but not terribly too soon.
Oh, drat, I nodded off and ran out of Sunday before I was done with it. Clearly, it was done with me. And time gets the last word, always. The word it's saying to me now is sleep.
Sunday Verse
by Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page–
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil–
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet–
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”
All in all I did not enjoy Sunday. For one thing I slept poorly, and for another when I woke up I'd had a very weird dream and remembered it, which rarely happens, but then I forgot it later, which always happens. There was no more rain, but then there was no sun to speak of either, so it was dull and monotonous. I'd hoped to get some laundry done, but the laundry room was busy, so in the end all I got done was to empty the trash. Oh, and I did fix a decent dinner, but it was a bit too large and I overate, and now must pay for that, probably with a second night of poor sleep.
Rain is still scheduled for Monday, but Tuesday's has vanished from the forecast. Possible showers remain predicted for Wednesday, but after that there's a bunch of sunny but chilly days. I guess that's a good thing for anybody who got flooded by the storms, as things will dry out for the cleanup, but for the rest of us it's just a reminder of creeping drought. It's probably too soon to worry, but not terribly too soon.
Oh, drat, I nodded off and ran out of Sunday before I was done with it. Clearly, it was done with me. And time gets the last word, always. The word it's saying to me now is sleep.
Sunday Verse
Marginalia
by Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page–
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil–
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet–
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”
