Like a Man Gone Mad: Poems in a New Century

Heredity’s a Card That’s Always Dealt Face Down

57 Heredity’s a Card That’s Always Dealt Face Down I met the daughter of a daughter of a student from an English class I offered fifty years ago. Like someone overtaken in a race, I felt both in arrears and dated. Appearing older with the young but younger with the old is how I see myself these days. But what’s the point? Are years from birth more relevant than history? I trace my mother’s heritage to great grandparents only, and my father’s to his father— no farther back than that. My nameless predecessors vanish in Darwinian oblivion. Or do they? Whatever they were, I am. Who knows what heathens, heroes, Homers, hookers, Hitlers, hunters, holier-than-thouers, hacks or hicks or humpbacks hide like secrets in my genes? I’m just the next progenitor whose future is a past to come. If that’s the formula, why fret? 58 Between the randomly begotten and the soon to be forgotten, I expect I’ll be remembered only as a temporary presence known as me and, even then, dismissively. ...