PERSONAL HISTORY
This calendar is one, unduplicate
and unrepetitive, being my own.
What system it may have I leave testate
in the genes of time as my memento
of the events, holidays, and seasons
that made the living so importantly
mine: a personal history of nones,
kalends, and ides, without chronology.
God knows I fought my own battles, made peace
with defeats and victories, wept and cheered.
A soldier without rank, I took my ease
where and when I could find it, having feared
and met the worst, and found the enemy
no braver than myself, as much in need
of saints and miracles, each pharisee
to his own convictions, though we bleed.
What headlines emphasized my days and nights
are filed within the archive of my skull,
a private record of scandals and crimes
no press would care to publish, were it called
to print even a single edition,
for the weather alone would defy all guess,
being unpredictable, rain or sun,
and variable as the heart's unrest.
Such rulings, documents, customs, arts
my life decreed, my life was witness to:
I felt, I thought, I celebrated, start
to finish, the world that entered through
these walls of flesh; and there its evidence
shall wait, in secret tissues of the bone,
until some future historian's pen
can disclose the infiniteness of One.