on reflection

I’ve heard memories change each time you recall them,

as if each is a set of two facing mirrors where both panes

have sprinkled in artistic license. It reminds me a bit of history,

each present’s prejudice sprinkled onto the canvas of the past,

the tellings and its inflections becoming part of the story:

we’re a microcosm of the world, lakes imitating the behavior of seas.

The only thing safe from time is on the page, sure, it will be read

by a different me, one, momentarily not as dead.

We strangers share a kind of spliced telephone line,

I can hear the past but speak to the future,

so I journal and craft poetry and prose for a stranger,

she knows my trivia, the lines of my bucket list,

what old adventures felt like the moment I lived in their sunlight,

the best lines of my closest friends as they said them,

things that to this day I wish that I could say, 

an indeterminable feeling I needed three hundred pages to explain.

Altogether, I guess you have the sum of me, best as I can

define it for myself: the whole changing with every new face in that ascending

set of reflections, the parts trapped in amber, preserved in golden glow.