marginalia (2010)

MARGINALIA

After a year, the accessories of our separate lives have intertwined: i.e. the bookshelf, where my eyeliner and four thousand bottles of black nail polish have occupied all available space, have in fact expanded from a military outpost surrounded by barbed-wire to a number of flourishing agricultural endeavors, even, frequently, embarking on diplomatic missions to the representatives of Dental Hygiene, conferring at length on the bathroom sinktop. As for the bookshelf proper, see how my paperbacks have insinuated themselves, subverting (like the good possessions of an English major!) the patriarchy’s imposition of a very masculine organization. Note also the stubbornly indeterminate coffee and cocoa stains between their pages. The bookshelf suffices for an example – there is no need to point out the books, the notebooks, the pens (my own and the ones I have stolen, unintentionally of course, from you) scattered like fall leaves across the coffee table, the dining table, the TV, the floor. The post-it notes and envelopes and expired coupons and postcards flocking like butterflies to the fragrant manure of any flat open space. This is our life together: my tendrils of mess entwined with the necessities of your life. I reside with you, dear man, as marginalia. You are the strong angles and sure text, German blackletter. I my love am the red commentary (not authoritative), added in a moment of boredom or whimsy in a spidery and uncertain hand. I am the curls and curlicues of greenery, the phantastical flowers obscuring the clean reading of the text. I am the private, unrelated drama – the courtly, unsanctioned adultery going on quietly behind the great gilt curve of the capital G. Look – that dragon in the corner, twirling and twisting spinelessly around his own scarlet belly. How frivolous his emerald cavorting! How irrelevant to the auctoritee, the firm black text, he decorates. See how delighted he is, simply to be there, turning coloured flips for joy around the beloved words!

from Love Songs for Dennis (2011)