Palavras lidas #340

Genealogy
by Gail Mazur

Of my ancestors I know little, and to try
tracing them now would be absurd,

their surnames reinvented, mangled
at every gate. Was there, among their number,

a hero? Were there heliographs,
a silhouette, daguerreotypes, lost

in the wolverine dark as they fled
where they were unwanted for where

they were unwanted? To me,
it doesn’t matter—like William James,

they believed in free will. Summer nights,
I stroll Broadway or Pennsylvania

or Massachusetts Avenue, haloed
in the night lamps’ sodium vapors,

and they are my marveling entourage,
small, bent, dogged, homely,

though I turned out tall—oh, generations
of nutrition—and when I sleep,

they toss beside me, blacksmiths,
dentists, deliverers of ice, of knives,

of artificial flowers, of a posterity
bred heartlessly to lose them.