The Fix

You read books, old and new while the Grecian river flows onward 

So you’ve no help for it but to scribble in the margins. 

You’ve no help for it…Call Charon or Dickens 

It hardly matters, wave your pencil Lethe-wards

No one cares. Pages are an upright affair 

And short lived to boot. Once I struggled 

For a month to read Egyptian grammar 

A college vanity—and so much death 

In every line! And look! They scribbled 

In the margins, sometimes wrote on men. 

“May I look upon my soul and my shadow?”

Asks Anonymous in the Egyptian Book 

Of the Dead but no one answers,

Only the clean papyrus

Waving languidly in the wind.