When I imagine how my parents met <br />in a Montréal bar, on a Wednesday in 1967, <br />I worry that it might not have happened— <br />that they might have turned from each other <br />to unconsummate me. <br /> <br />Nonexistence begins when <br />my father walks to the restroom, <br />his stylish lampchops blinkering his sight, <br />and my mother drops something on the floor, <br />lipstick perhaps. They never make eye contact, <br />and I am blinded, <br />unloved. <br /> <br />But when I go back further, <br />beyond the dating of my grandparents, <br />and I salmon-swim through the current <br />of centuries, I see a school of unknown <br />relatives that had to love and lust, <br />without deviation, for me to exist as I do. <br /> <br />Beginning with two apes that rutted in a forest, <br />dead generations whisper in our blood vessels, <br />just like a chance meeting between my wife and me <br />will someday hide in the tissue of a great- <br />great-grandchild. Our delicate love <br />echoes with the shaking beds of history. <br /> <br />The closed door yell of orgasm <br />and birth, century after century, <br />brought my son umbilicalled into this world— <br />and somewhere, somewhere unknown, <br />a girl has been born who will look <br />at our boy with honeyed eyes, or— <br /> <br />just as likely— <br />she will dropp her lipstick, <br />and never know that <br />he existed.<br /><br />Patrick Hicks<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/lipstick-traces/
