On my 17th birthday
My mother gifts me a word:
Marginalia.
It rolls off the tip of my tongue, dripping
to that blank space authors dare not touch.
Splats of ink, scribbles
left here and there, mingled
with underlines, highlights,
dashes to coat the page.
Marginalia bears marks
of her father’s name, his crumbling
paperbacks from his old college days
lay coated with scraps of his soul.
He used a ruler as his bookmark, a guarantee
his underlinings would be straight and readable.
50 years later you can still trace
the outlines of his thoughts
with your fingertips. Even then,
he knew he was writing for someone else.
I can’t recall a single conversation with my grandfather.
But working my way through his withered words,
I learn how he saw the world in his youth.
I scratch marks of agreement
by lines we both loved,
leave question marks where
I know we’d have disagreed.
Pen responses to his past thoughts.
A trail of myself furnishing the margins
fit for future readers to discover.
