If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters, and I think of the poor mother brooding over her sightless young triplets. Not to mention why. Just so she could cut off the tails with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer, but the thought of them without eyes and now without tails to trail through the moist grass or slip around the corner of a baseboard has the cynic who always lounges within me up off his couch and at the window trying to hide the rising softness that he feels. 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.
Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, hands cupped around their mouths. 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 more 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. The one on the facing page, however, who looks at me over her bare shoulder, cannot hide the shadow of annoyance in her brow.