Genealogist

by Kristin Camitta Zimet

Under the library, she is dug in.

Perpetual fluorescence graces her

dispassion. The heat pump chants

around her, halo of sound,

breathes for the sealed building. 

She disinters the ancestors

from ash-gray cardboard,

caskets manufactured to resist

the powers that unmake us:

moisture, acid, heat and light. 

Before her, multitudes line up,

serving indenture past term

they imagined, scratched together

out of will or deed, hanging by

the flyleaf of a crumbled Testament. 

Soldiers muster out of file,

a century in temporary camp.

“Darling, I am not afraid,”

one writes, and jumps to silence.

Was he? She is not paid to guess, 

only to map the pedigrees

his daughters’ daughters crave,

the spells of immortality

cast backward, but a worm

of curiosity turns in her belly. 

Soft tissue of conjecture

sloughs from a solitaire of bones

until she longs to lay them down,

these parchment souls who cannot tell

who they were, who we are,

absolve them all into a common grave,

one ground of shared unknowing; prays

for the ritual locking of the doors,

the breaking of the circuits,

the punch of clock; to run 

up the stairs and out into the street

into a rich dank rain

where headlights shine a brief

blessing into the fog,

and all in a blink it is night. 

Kristin Camitta Zimet is the editor of The Sow's Ear Poetry Review and the author of Take in My Arms the Dark, a full length collection of poems.