Lineage

Somewhere behind me
men crossed cold water
under names I only half know now,

names carried in fragments,
in family stories,
in the kept sound of places,
in the blunt music of loss.

Norse weather.
Island weather.
The long drag of sea and wind.
Heather. Loch. Stone.
A history moving north to west
and back again through blood,
through marriages, departures, deaths,
through whatever survives
when the great claims are gone.

Not kings, exactly.
Not now.
Not banners.
Not the old machinery of rank.

What comes down instead
is harder to display.

A pressure.
A tone in the spirit.
A habit of endurance.
A memory for sorrow.
A sense that the dead
are not finished with us,
that they continue
in the grain of the voice,
in what we carry without knowing,
in what breaks us open
and asks to be made.

I am not made for conquest.
Whatever battle-fever was in them
arrived in me altered.

No sword.
No oath-ring.
No horse stamping in the dark.
Only the small republic of the page,
the pencil in the hand,
the hand itself unsteady sometimes,
having known what it knows.

And yet it is not nothing.

To sit in silence long enough
for language to gather.
To hear, under speech,
the old undertow.
To make from grief
something measured,
something that can be carried.
To answer the lost
with form.

Maybe this is how inheritance works
when power has thinned out of it.

The old fierceness survives,
but inward.
Transmuted.

It comes now
as persistence,
as craft,
as the refusal to let suffering
go unnamed.

The poet is not the hero
the old stories would have wanted.
He does not take cities.
He does not found dynasties.
He does not stand in bronze
with a weapon raised.

He listens.

He keeps the ember.
He finds the live coal in the ash.
He speaks for those
whose names fell out of the record,
whose grief did not become history,
whose tenderness left no monument.

And if there is nobility in that,
it is a later kind,
stripped of pageantry,
earned in solitude.

So the line goes on.
Not in titles.
Not in land held or lost.
Not in blood made sacred
for its own sake.

It goes on in the sounded word,
in the note held long enough
to become witness,
in the poem that remembers
what the world is always forgetting.

This is what remains.

A man at a desk.
Rain somewhere outside.
A history without clear edges.
Music in the next room, maybe.
The old wounds stirring
into language.

And through him
the dead, once more,
crossing over.