The Book - Mike Dillon

[Larry Robinson]

The Book

Each heart carries the true book of its life.
Torn pages, a broken binding,
underlined or blacked-out passages, sure --
but the book, flapping in wind and rain
or lying open in a sunlit garden whispers
faintly as a pigeon's wing-beat across
a sunrise bay: This book is true.

We think we can read it through
the glare our own lives make. We think 
we can write and read the story we are in
though the story drifts away with each telling
over cocktails, updated resume or paid obituary:
Those easy words that push away the true.

The book shadows the shadows our bodies make.
It refuses to sneeze in our dust turned to dust.
This is the book, in the end, we cannot read.
This is the book, from the beginning, that reads us.
Clasped to our breast like a romantic folly
we take to the grave where it is never so true.

	- Mike Dillon