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
The sidelines here a metaphor for the margin of the page and continue the sports analogy begun in the opening lines of the stanza.
Marginalia