for Sir John Guise
In many a powerless mind
lurks this chart, wider than the world,
maybe vast enough to wrap Earth in,
which diagrams with merciless truth
the parentage of everyone, identified
and linked with their real blood kin
across all of time and space.
Strips and fragments of this
have always been waved, in ribaldry
or secret, at Identity overdone,
that is, underdone with intent—
wives have hung them out with the smalls,
Hitler sent Panzers to train
all over his, for Gentility.
Certain knowledge or the insurrection
of guesswork, month-counter’s revenge, the
mugging of high sentence by and with
its impossible relations—plenty
if they could get the true chart
wouldn’t care that to display it entire
might be ridiculous and terrible:
Howls of revised posh, unspoken people,
cousinship with kulak-shooters, death-rays
of Whititude and Negritude, burning wills,
anguish of men out of whose children
other men peer innocently,
shock historical non-paternities
and the stratosphere-tightening
gasp at incest seen in full.
Glorious to see a hero car-bomber
shattered by wrong ancestry, a Klan klutz
awed by strata of peoples, all his,
or an adoptee hunched, devouring names,
but the chart would need to hang
in Space, to be safe from us,
like the relativised stars, which were
once also made by love.
A million years’ unreachable blamed dead
might stun revenge, sheer wealth of tangents
heal affinity and victimhood:
an Indigenous poet might regain her
Hispano-Scots Kanak dimensions, as her
scorners darkly complexified.
She’s your aunt a thousand generations
before your sealblubber aunts, Son of Heaven.
A species-deep net of anecdote
with every life its pardon.
In that weak Force I’m one eighth
of a musketeer, being slightly a Dumas
on my Aboriginal side. The chart is always
odder than reincarnation’s princess tales
with truncations and tears. It’s the galaxy
we are making, the kinship sum:
I’m game to see it. I want it to come.