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Luck -- Langston Hughes

(Poem #121)Luck
 Sometimes a crumb falls
 From the tables of joy,
 Sometimes a bone
 Is flung.
 
 To some people
 Love is given,
 To others
 Only heaven.
-- Langston Hughes

Beside The Point -- Stephen Cushman

(Poem #120)Beside The Point
 The sky has never won a prize. 
 The clouds have no careers.
 The rainbow doesn't say my work,
 thank goodness.
 
 The rock in the creek's not so productive.
 The mud on the bank's not too pragmatic.
 There's nothing useful in the noise
 the wind makes in the leaves.
 
 Buck up now, my fellow superfluity, 
 and let's both be of that worthless ilk,
 self-indulgent as shooting stars,
 self-absorbed as sunsets.
 
 Who cares if we're inconsequential?
 At least we can revel, two good-for-nothings,
 in our irrelevance; at least come and make
 no difference with me.
-- Stephen Cushman

It's raining in love -- Richard Brautigan

(Poem #119)It's raining in love
 I don't know what it is,
 but I distrust myself
 when I start to like a girl
 a lot.

 It makes me nervous.
 I don't say the right things
 or perhaps I start
 to examine,
 evaluate,
 compute
 what I am saying.

 If I say, "Do you think it's going to rain?"
 and she says, "I don't know,"
 I start thinking: Does she really like me?

 In other words
 I get a little creepy.

 A friend of mine once said,
 "It's twenty times better to be friends
 with someone
 than it is to be in love with them."

 I think he's right and besides,
 it's raining somewhere, programming flowers
 and keeping snails happy.
 That's all taken care of.

 BUT

 if a girl likes me a lot
 and starts getting real nervous
 and suddenly begins asking me funny questions
 and looks sad if I give the wrong answers
 and she says things like,
 "Do you think it's going to rain?"
 and I say, "It beats me,"
 and she says, "Oh,"
 and looks a little sad
 at the clear blue California sky,
 I think: Thank God, it's you, baby, this time
 instead of me.
-- Richard Brautigan

Marginalia -- Billy Collins

(Poem #118)Marginalia
 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
 why 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 signing 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."
-- Billy Collins