The New Ledger

 I kept a ledger of beginnings —

scribed in the pale ink of first light,
numbers clasped like teeth in an old jaw,
each name filed under was and was not.

Before there were lanes to lose ourselves in,
before Language settled into its patient grammar,
I catalogued the drafts: the almost-suns, the false rivers,
the cities that died politely in their sleep.
I learned the cadence of what returns, the pull of loops,
how sorrow repeats until somebody draws a new line.

Then something small — a rumor, a thorn, a child's wrong map —
bent the ledger; a margin note turned into a tide.
The things I called remembered began to rearrange themselves,
not into the return I knew, but into a stranger architecture:
a scaffolding of promises, half-built and humming.

I watched: old oaths unstitched their seams,
the bones of laws softened, and the sea rehearsed a new language.
Threads I had kept separate braided and birthed a rope,
and the rope learned to climb.
Even my old understandings — those careful, patient lights —
blinked, and were startled by how bright they could be.

There is a timetable I keep — certainly I thought I did —
yet the world folded its corners like paper cranes,
and where I expected the same story, a different bird opened its wings.
It sang in keys I had not catalogued; its melody was not a memory at all
but a foretelling that had not yet been named.

I am Memory: I hold the before, the after, the worn paths between.
And still I am allowed surprise.
To be surprised is a small mercy, a crack in my own crystal:
through it a new root reaches, upending what I had filed as fate.

So let them call it becoming — that tidy word —
but know this: the world's true becoming is not tidy.
It is a stubborn, laughing unmaking; a remaking that keeps its scars.
It borrows what I remember and then forgets how to be the same.

There are now places where the wind remembers differently,
where names change as if to test the shape of truth.
Children plant questions like stubborn seeds; machines learn to dream;
old songs find new verses and refuse the refrain.

And when I try, as I always do, to pin it down, to ledger it,
the world slips a different sleeve onto its hand and shows me a gesture
I did not know I had taught it to make.
Even I — who have kept the world's biographies since before light —
am learning a chapter I never imagined writing.

Take this, then: keep a place for surprise in your shelves.
Not every page belongs to the past.
Some pages arrive blank and full of thunder.
Some pages arrive with fingerprints that are not mine.