Ars Diarista

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.
—Anaïs Nin

I was the Great Red Memorializer
X-ing crimson plot points on the map of my life.
On the stage of my life I hit every mark
and the bluescreen was a slideshow
of all my carefully chronicled tableaux.

I wrote it like a book, I wrote it in a book—
my life stood, an edgeworn book. No bullets in the cylinder.
I wrote it, I killed it. I wrote it, I made it live forever.

I envied friends with sweeping memories—envied too
the fly-by-nighters in disposable capes and jetpacks,
bounding cloud to cloud, winds ensuring
they’d never suffer the same scenery twice.

                                                                     Love came, so
I stopped all that. Love came so I’m just here. Love came
and I shed days like petals off a week-old bouquet—
brushed them off the ledge, fed the compost pile.
Did not press them in pages. Told no stories.

And now I’m really here—
self-possessed and possessed of self and not much else.
Motion not memory. Me immemorial, tasting once.
O the present is a present inside a present inside a present.