My grandfather’s life was called a “storied past,”

as if he might have had alternatively an unstoried past,

as if, whether or not he had free will, he had two

paths to follow, one storied and the other not,

or even as if he might have followed, or even

did follow, both paths, and the only past we noticed

was the storied one, while the submerged and unstoried

one was noticeable only to our own unstoried selves,

flowing down a parallel river of time, or maybe

not parallel but meandering, though the selves

and the rivers meet at the end, just as if to prove

that even parallel waters eventually meet,

converging and blending clarities, and this suggests

that the storied and unstoried lives may be alike,

may even be indistinguishable, that the second self

is the first one, not even a shadow of the first one,

though a meeting of parallels is proof of the mortality

of linearity, of curvatures and disruptions,

of the interventions of the jagged, a proof

my grandfather would approve, who needed no

fancy lines about crooked timbers of humanities

to know the crookednesses in time, the frequent bumpings

together of parallels, the confluences of waters

and bloods and humors, the gentle clashes of shadows

more palpable than Venn circles, and the hollows

filled with the stones of his stories open to sun

and rain, to the ends of time, to the ends of times

and of half times, for desire coils endings back

to beginnings, and stories start over, and river and sun

and old man all come together to die and be born.