then as maybe now
every day came
with a purpose
you just had to wait
with an open pocket
it’d slip something in—

a book of poems
a tails-up coin
a bottlecap
printed inside
with a riddle
something;

one day followed
the one before
they were
all in a row
but each one
unexpected

like dominoes set
just so
far apart
if one fell
it was the only
casualty;

all together
small multiples of life
each ending
with a death
each beginning with
a birth.

Image: Write me by Menno Abbink, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.

Small multiples are a data-visualization concept popularized (and I believe named) by Edward Tufte in his classic book, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,” which is truly incredible; you should read it, even if (especially if) you don’t much care for Quantitative Information. He describes them thus:

“Illustrations of postage-stamp size are indexed by category or a label, sequenced over time like the frames of a movie, or ordered by a quantitative variable not used in the single image itself.”

Which sounds like my days.