“Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon
on the day you were born,
you would be all done in only one more year?
Of course, you couldn’t have done that all alone.
So never mind; you’re fine just being yourself.
You’re loved for just being you.
But did you know that at your age
Judy Garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture,
Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory
and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room
— no wait, I mean he had invented the calculator?
Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life,
after you come out of your room and begin to blossom,
or at least pick up all your socks.
For some reason I keep remembering that
Lady Jane Grey was queen of England when she was only 15.
But then she was beheaded,
so never mind her as a role model.
A few centuries later, when he was your age,
Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family,
but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies, four operas and two complete masses as a youngster.
But of course, that was in Austria at the height of Romantic lyricism,
not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.
Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15
or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
We think you’re special just being you —
playing with your food and staring into space.
By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,
but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.”

—Billy Collins

followed obediently by the title, the plot, 

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel 

which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, 

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor 

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, 

to a little fishing village where there are no phones. 

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye 

and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, 

and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, 

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, 

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. 

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, 

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue 

or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. 

It has floated away down a dark mythological river 

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall 

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those 

who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. 

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night 

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. 

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted   

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart." - Billy Collins