There are people of all kinds
Looking for their ancestors
They have bits of history
Sticking to their lives like polythene windows
That are inexplicable
Times within times within
Pictures out of the comic books of the past
Like sticky patches of extra clothes stuck on their skin
Chromosomes within chromosomes
Messages written into messages that body on
One day you get an inkling
Of a matching photo fit in your gallery of lost faces
You go to an address and find
An old room where an ancestor carved his roast
And it was in you and being in you
It was in what you did and where you went
Tracing some event that you don’t see properly
A still-life in your life painted by a great grandfather
Like travellers we hop from stage to stage
Theatrical part works made of the past
And we find an old diary of a life
And we read about the things we suspect are miracles
Left to us in light of death
In the continuum of life’s strange disappearance
And so, when we’re feeling lost
With many loses to our bill that we cannot pay
we Get out our bits of family history
and Follow them into the leftovers of place and time
Yes, you say, an ancestor came to this town a long time ago
And left his time-and-place in your soul
