Experiences

She collects experiences
as others
might collect sea glass
or civil war swords.
She crosses off countries she has journeyed to
as if they were eggs and strawberry jam
on a shopping list.
She has dined on alligator tails and frog legs.
Chicken, she says,
tastes just like rattlesnake.
Some call her an adventurer,
an explorer, a seeker
and they are not wrong.
She has climbed to the top of precipitous cliffs,
sailed a sea kayak in Northern waters,
faced the rapids of a wilderness river.
What will happen, she wonders
when there is
nothing left to try?

Would you, she asks,
prefer to experience an event
without a resultant memory
or possess a memory of an experience
which has never actually happened?