i.
My uncle is dead on page three.
Then, I kissed Steve until our lips went numb.
Next, my car wouldn't start and I needed a jump and the cold was intense...

The monogamy of paper,
the irregular deposit of days
forced into metronomic time-
a record of my terrible priorities, my inhuman obsessions,
my solipsism.

Worse: these pages don't help me remember,
not even the last name of that guy, the numb guy.
The days are uneven, no matter what I write.

ii.
My grandmother, now a shade,
left among her things a stack of journals
written for me, to me:
like letters of her hours, catalogs
of all she could have said to me
in twenty overlapping years on earth.

Four states and two decades later,
locked in a room where a bat had flown spasmodically
just a few hours before,
I read every word of every journal,
searching for an entry that entered her mind.

When I called my mother and described my findings,
she sighed,
That's not true.
None of that is true.

I kept them all, locked them away like history.

iii.
My students are desperate:
Was he...gay? Why did he write that?
One young woman, a bard freak, theatrical in all things,
spits out, I wish he'd kept a journal.
Would that help? I ask.
They nod,
dictators of their truth.