like an expert, breaking the Weissman barrier,
but not him, nothing like that. He was decent
but lacked audacity, I don’t know if I have or
haven’t them. I’m taken by the second and he
thought little worse, except politicians and I’ve
taken that from him but voted left while he for
all they did to him, lies and government decisions
voted for the status quo, the day’s unhero in him
Syria and Kokoda a Mention in Despatches
for gallantry (he never mentioned), the heavy
calibre shells which tore right through him
like a sheet of cardboard. Despite that he didn’t
(I do) complain. Try not to (which is him) but
take myself too seriously (which is her). Genes
gave me his baldness, his shortness and even his
psoriasis but plain inheritance gave my brothers
the family farm. I was never interested,  though
we’ve all got big jovial hands. If none of this is
Lamarckian, as I hinted at the outset, genes are
beginnings which are chromosome Boleros
always starting again, but does elan vital have no
lineage? I could search for his self within me like
a river of trances. Or in pools or depths or bends.
Or hear my high notes sung where he had none
like Allegri’s Miserere flying in the throat of a boy
or back there in the cantors the Rabbi they said
didn’t exist. Not in a sarcastic uncle, a fraudulent
nephew, my father’s mother at a hundred and three
insisting I keep up with the moment: all this
he pushed against his own Oedipal door-stop.
Fathers, you are Lamarckian progenitors, you
invent your sons. But he wasn’t and he didn’t.