116. Ancestuaries of the Burgeoning Past

indefinite retention | maybe a dream

or humanity’s nightmare | everything remembered
everything kept | the world repeated each day
no fact to escape | the bonds of memory
written in ink or digits | if we remember
our lives | we see the failures we were
how the world | we lived arrayed before us
is nothing but return | absent of forward
we step | so that we might step again
into the same river | for the river never changes
it flows | but in a circle that brings it back
to this same second | which we can examine
never escape | memory is a magnet urging
into us all that we | might
have the need to know | or it is a colander
through which the present | flows into and out of
us | so that no present can ever become past
the horror at the empty | vault
the equal horror | at the archives spilling
forth | in the form of a wave of blood

take the sense | of the past
of a family | how you (precisely you)
have queried the records | brought the facts
within them into a simulacrum | of order
decided the truth of these pasts | and even
drawn lines | between the blood
in your veins | and that in all these inexhaustible
people | ancestors to your own marrow
do you wonder | if
these records | insights
stories constructed | from unreconstructed inkings
tells this saga well enough | or too well?
does the text representing | your genetic legacy
fog your memory with | possibility or provide
a sense of the past as an illegible mark | made
only more important | for being the last one
scratched into your skin | and drawing forth
blood | to demonstrate you
and how you came to | be
as one capsule of | human thought awalk over the earth?

we have no standard to measure | the urgent
desire to have | information enough
to imagine | the smallest | most important | corner
of the world | for the pleasure of
the mind in a quest | to know
without need to | except for the desperation
for it | the hand against
the weather-worn limestone | headstone
outline of a willow | as a reflection of a shadow
the surviving text | shallow hollows on its surface
brought into relief | only from the pain of
knowing | the particular aggregations
of despair and lingering agony | that beset
the bones beneath it | for years before the gift
of death | and the resignation to thereof
not to say grief | is but the only message
a life gives to our memory | only that we
struggle to collect the record | to know the past of us
and we can accept only so much | of it
without the balm of sleep | without knowledge