How Every Moment is a Memoir:

upon reading Paul Monette's book, Becoming a Man

I remember first reading you at twelve,
Your letters sweet in my mouth, even when
I couldn't vocalize your name. My every thought
was for the literariness of what you would
become a decade from then, now a brushstroke
of my pen, countless nights of tears
comparable to endless drops of ink
as I write this. I cannot paint what
then I was, wrote Wordsworth,
but then I can look back and see how
every letter of every name of every
man I ever loved had burned itself into
this journal, this paper, long before I
ever picked up my pen. How, as a child,
every searching moment was one more
stroke of ink to this moment, how painting
what I once was is not what I do now,
but what I've been doing, from the very first
moment I cried my sins to God to the
moment when I realized that God would
let me Live, and let me Love.
How I started spelling transcendence
before I learned I could truly speak.