I bought your copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner from a second hand bookseller in New York.

Only your first initial, “I”, is on the first page. I don’t know your full name.
But I know you from the margins, the handwriting, the way you annotate.

Most of the time, your annotations are controlled and analytical. Like this may have been a poetry book you had to read for class.
But sometimes they stray.

There are stanzas that have no annotations, no analysis. As if from studying, there was something you found that pulled you out of it. That made you drift beyond the assignment, into a more unconscious place.

This stanza is your most restless underlining. Sharp lines, words crossed through:

Still as a slave before his land

The ocean hath no blast,

His great bright eye most silently

Upon the Moon is cast –

This line has crossed centuries to come to you, and then an unknown time, to come to me. And while it may have been lost in the density of time and never regained, a moment of yours remained. I reread this line, thinking about what made you pause on it for so long. What struck something immediate in you.

And because of that, it did the same to me.

There was a certain stillness in the park that day. Somewhere between a kid’s laughter and the hit of a baseball bat, I was transfixed — not just by the line, but by you within it. Like your gaze controlled the sensations around me. Like it turned everything into something larger, something that went beyond time.

My eye perceived what yours did.

The ocean locking it’s gaze on the moon.

And I felt that I was looking at you as much as you were looking at me. Cast into a kind of trance, where the poet became a passage between us.

Even if you will never see this, you saw it first, for me to be able to gaze back at you.

And so I waited, like the ocean, allowing the next wave of life to move me forward. Even though I wanted to stay there with you. Whether you are dead or alive, your voice will always create a silence before the next breath takes it away again.

But in that silence, there is more life than in the breath that follows.

I’ll carry you with me.

Until this post gets old.
Until I add my own writing to the margins.

And when I’m gone, I’ll know I etched something there, with you.

From me, and a moment out of time,
K