I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. Sylvia Plath

The past is present in all our genes
and when you begin to recognize ancestors
running through your blood
you begin the blessed process of forgetting
the here and now, as a free-standing reality,
and so begin the unknowing of yourself.
Discarding the slippery glimmer of today,
putting on the face to meet
the faces that we meet.
We now can apprehend 
consciousness moving away from us nto the dark recesses
of the blood,
jumping along, generation after generation,
always arriving back in the present
bruised from the fight yet shining a light
into the dangerous past of Vikings, Jacobites
men whose hands were never clean,
those who shared their homes with animals,
young men who  Recruiting Sergeants marched off to war
by means of the old king’s shilling.
We carry the genes of victims
of Droit du seigneur (ius primae noctis)
which allowed the Lord to take the virginity
of all new wives. We can taste the ways
in which the past seeps into the present
and notice how our genetic inheritance
is left to do its work, again,
in this particular time and place.