Marginalia

To write in the margins
is to argue with the dead
in a room they can no longer leave.

Their sentences arrive intact,
authoritative, centuries in the making.
Mine, in pencil, crooked—
a small dissent
the next reader may take for agreement.

I have found whole arguments
conducted across a single copy
by people who never met,
the last word going to whoever
owned the book at the end.

I wonder who has mine.