St. Bernard Soap Factory

Symmetric stone-stepped gables bookend
an ivory clock tower, a Midwest Amsterdam
imitation saddled along Mill Creek.

The smokestack is a blown-out taper,
smoldering since 1886,
an industrial smudge stick.

My grandfather is here, in 1933, and once someone
figures out travel across time and space,
we will finally meet.

Or in Youngstown, breaking horses.
Or on the farm in Pennsylvania, up at sunrise with the cows.
Or in the doublewide in California, worrying about the bakery,

over coffee.
Or in New Zealand, fetching Olive after the war.
Tending the sheep while mom walks to school.

I’ve been working out the mystery of you;
excavating, collecting the spectacular and the ugly of you,
trying on the cloaks of your mythology

to understand the shrouded quarter of my DNA.
The St. Bernard Soap Factory still stands,
a white brick guidepost,

a monument to your past,
or a hollowed-out husk
where history embalmed itself.