Cliche

Cliché


My life is an open book. It lies here
on a glass tabletop,
its pages shamelessly exposed,
outspread like a bird with hundreds
of thin paper wings.

It is a biography, needless to say,
and I am reading and writing it
simultaneously
in a language troublesome and private.
Every reader must be a translator
with a thick lexicon.

No one has read the whole thing but me.
Most dip into the middle
for a few paragraphs,
then move on to other shelves,
other libraries.
Some have time only
for the illustrations.

I love to feel the daily turning
of the pages,
the sentences unwinding like string,
and when something really important
happens,
I walk out to the edge of the page
and, always the student,
make an asterisk, a little star,
in the margin.


Billy Collins

Posted over on Poem-A-Day