Asked, the night before I left to live in Argentina,
just so I could take the knowledge with me,
my Father charted out the lines of my immediate
ancestry, factored them down as if he were
deeply engaged in scribbling out the diagram
of a balanced, well-constructed sentence.
On a clean sheet of paper, he drew all the family
tree lines then added the names, dates
and places from memory, right back to the eight
dimensions of the fourth generation, direct,
none removed. (He said he could, if I wanted,
draw the lines back to 14th-century England,
when the name of our ancestor Roger, a ship’s chandler,
was listed in an old, old Book as the mayor
of King’s Lynne, on The Wash in Norfolk, the entrance
guarded by the pebble beaches and cold waves
of the North Sea.) My Father punched black holes in the page,
as if it were a galaxy of its own, had them
swallow up a thin blue ribbon he threaded through that
connected all the names and branches. And then,
thinking of the parameters of pedigree, he closed the loop,
tied it into an encircling continuum that undulated
through the page like those dark gravitational waves
that bridge the celestial firmament, sometimes
reflect Light, urged me to think of the eternity, the “foreverness”
of it all, even though he knew I would be away
for too short a Time to relate to something that incredibly important.
These are the kinds of things my Father knew how
to do with ease as he sat calmly at the kitchen table
tying my name to those who had come before.
—Utah, May 1964
Simon Peter Eggertsen was born in Kansas, raised in Utah, schooled in Virginia and England. He came late to poetry, has degrees in literature, language and law (BYU, Virginia, Cambridge). His work has appeared in Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, Ekphrasis, Atlanta Review, Vallum, Weber: The Contemporary West, and Dialogue, among others. A set of his verse won the Irreantum Prize for Poetry (2012), others have been named finalists or shortlisted for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (Nimrod, 2009), the Fish Poetry Prize (Ireland, 2013, 2014, 2018, and 2021), Poem of the Year (ARC, [Canada] 2013), the Malahat Review Prize (Canada, 2014, 2017), the Bridport Prize (UK, 2019), and, recently, runner-up for the Robert Frost Poetry Award (2020). Eggertsen’s poems have been anthologized six times, notably in Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets (2011), and he has one chapbook to his credit, Memories as Contraband (Finishing Line, 2014).