Phantom Ancestor
Hawker of Morwenstow
Who wouldn’t claim a man like this
for an ancestor? Poet, man of God,
mermaid impersonator, who bore the name
of my maternal line, whose wives
were twice his age then less than half,
who saw birds as the thoughts of the Almighty
and engaged them in fervent theological debate.
Whose pets were a pig called Gyp
and a stag called Robin, and nine cats
who joined his human congregation (his tenth
cast into outer darkness for the sin, cardinal
not venial, of mousing on the Sabbath).
I see my phantom ancestor, Parson Hawker,
gazing out across the Atlantic from
his cliffside driftwood hut and drawing on
his opium pipe while he is visited by the muse,
asking And shall Trelawny die?
And I wonder how many minutes passed
between his eleventh hour adoption
of the Roman path and the exhalation
of his final breath.