One hundred pages written fifty years
ago, I’m reading like they’re fresh this week.
Amid the words a character appears:
a woman-girl whose memory I seek.
She wrote of incidents I don’t recall.
She often seemed too self-dismayed to thrive.
Each day she’d start the diet to end all,
for she abhorred one hundred sixty-five.

It doesn’t take the wisdom of my age
to see the shape of personality
obsessed with numbers, graphing on a page
a hopeful record of futility.
I do not need more time to recognize
myself, esteem the well, and lose the lies.