My Great-Grandfather Would Have Been 107 Today.

[rachelleneveu]

 

famed warrior

(For Louis Setnar)

You died long before I was born.
A heart attack, maybe, finished the job
the Czar and schizophrenia and
that stupid shark couldn't get right.
I think I have your nose.

Your daughter tells stories about
how you tried to swim to America,
how you held her children like they were made of porcelain,
how you slapped your wife at the table
when the dinner burned

and I look at your portrait and I wonder
if there's anything real to the rumor
that you had a whole other family back in Russia.
I wonder if there is another girl
with hair like mine, with eyes like yours

sitting somewhere across the world
and thinking the same thing.
I wonder if she too holds black-and-white photographs
and studies them like scripture, trying to make
heads or tails of this man, this boy

standing against a fencepost
in a village I'll never see
with relatives I'll never meet
and stories I'll never hear.
At the very least, I think I would have liked to know you.

The myths of my family are built on lies;
tales erased and scribbled over
with new realities, with new stories that fill in the blanks
and become infinitely more interesting
than the truth.