A poem to which I return from time to time is Billy Collins’ Marginalia. Collins writes about margin-notes he’s found over a reading lifetime; one favorite explains a smudge by saying, “Pardon the egg-salad stains, but I’m in love.”
It’s not a book, but the sea’s edge also holds comment, as does the edge of day.
At day’s end I go down to the sea for late January’s added minute or two of light. On this day, the low sun is nested in a slate and pastel backdrop, and the news of the recent coldsnap drifts by as a slurry of near-ice. Tomorrow, the bay will be transformed; it will carry a cloak of ice that will rise and fall with the 9-foot tide. And soon miniature bergs will litter the shoreline, tossed and thrust up by collision and wind; we will look arctic along our edge.
As I watch it the sun also looks for a moment like a smudge, a fingerprint on the sky’s margin. Yes, I love the little added light as night comes on.
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