Keeper of the Begats

My mother
who tells the begats as others tell beads
leads her daughter to be
through our generations
sleeping
as a storm drives spray and sand across their hilltop.
I am dismissed,
“your grandmother’s bed is looking a little shabby.
why don’t you trim her cypress,
tidy her borders.
Your sister’s been coming up with yarn samples
and school pictures of the kids.”

Bliss who would be your great great
built the Methodist Church that stood across the road there
until it burnt one night
when I was still a little girl
you remember the piece of slag from the bell
my grandfather kept on the bookshelves at the Quincy house
with a picture of the fire
I suppose my uncle David took them
we didn’t find them when we closed up Mother’s
no, of course you don’t remember him, dear
he died two years before you were born
that’s his stone
the pink granite over there.
When I go I’m going right between him and Nenny
just like winter nights
before the church burnt down.

Wife and mother
holding, withholding begats as desert rain
talk together through our generations
sharing
wives cut short waiting
men and boys drowned on glassy bay
babies taken in passing blight
we have risen from these stones
standing on their shoulders
to seek beyond lapis and turquoise horizon
when I come to sleep
will there be room among them?