Isn’t it annoying, how you can read all

you want about the past, but not go there?

Collect whatever you want from back then,

whenever, put it on a shelf. You can even

decide you like a time period, hit up eBay

or Craigslist, and in no time you can have

almost whatever you want. That’s it, though.

 

Like you can’t go hang out and get to know

your Neanderthal forebears, the 2% of you

that, supposedly, makes it difficult for you

to get rid of the things you don’t need.

No lunch with that guy in his cave, no family

reunion among the pelts and skins, no gazing

at their pigmented hand-print cave art

 

by hearth-light or chewing the fat about

the latest hunt. You’ll never get to ask

what he saved from his ancestors, or whether

they believed a person stays connected

to their things like your family does—

a rocking chair a stand-in for a grandmother.

You can read all you want about revolutions

 

and ships at sea and suffering and even

about how babies were born before modern

medicine, or about how people brushed

their teeth and stayed warm, but nothing

about what they wondered, nothing about

any one regular person’s worries, not how

they liked to fall sleep or what they thought,

 

really, about the prevailing ideas of the time.

I keep all sorts of things, I want to tell my guy

in the cave. I hold on to my great grand-

mother’s Complete Works of Robert Burns,

for one thing. I found a clue in it, just today—

a newspaper clipping I had missed the last

time I thumbed through it, bookmarking

 

the story of Highland Mary. There is nothing

like a sad story, right? They were days away

from being married. So deeply in love.

Guy in the cave, two-thousandth great grand-

father, what was love, really? Did you know

what married is? I read that you knew about loss,

that’s for sure. Recently, we learned you buried

 

your people with flowers. That’s how we first

learned you were more than ug ug ooga ooga

and grabbing women by the hair and clubbing

each other all day long. It was “Household Hints”

she used as a bookmark. So, there was a day, then,

when she was thinking about at least one

of these things: homemade cologne, mending

 

a kid glove, using soap tree bark for removing

spots from men’s clothing, tar soap shampoo

with a borax rinse, best ways to sweeten

preserves and sauces, folding a dress skirt

right-side-out to minimize wrinkles, splashing

the face with water and benzoin tincture

to whiten the skin and prevent wrinkles,

 

dusting a coat before hanging it up, or adding

a teaspoon of the best whiskey to a cup

of beef tea to stimulate an invalid. I can have

no idea what you thought about, though, way

before you were diluted down to 2% of me,

or maybe some percentage of her in her house-

hold, where I drank tea in a tiny cup in a tiny

 

pink rocking chair, way before she went blind

and broke her hip, way before, also, the book-

mark—and the pencil marks on “Cotter’s

Saturday Night,” sections I, IX, X XIV, XV, each

marked with a little oval O. This is all I’ve got,

though. No time portal to hop back through time

to know anything more, as I keep saying. No way

 

around being in the time I’m in, sitting here,

not knowing all the things I can’t know. Strange,

to live in a world full of facts and information

and alternative facts, post-truth, even, but still

have no way of ever knowing. So many minds’

quiet moments, lost forever. And me just sitting

here looking at a peat brick from the farm

 

that isn’t ours anymore, a cuckoo clock, three

generations of serving bowls, my grandfather’s

hammer, and on and on, married to a man

who came to me with a moth-eaten kilt, lead

toy soldiers, a tiny sailboat in a box, and an

assassin’s cane, and on and on—and me,

like a fool, imagining a piece of me will last.