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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
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