Weekly Poem: 'Ancestors'

**By Mary Ruefle** The best thing that ever happened to me was that my grandparents all died before I was born. I've never had a sense of who I am, and in that regard I've been lucky. It's only natural I know a little about them. One grandfather worked a steel lathe, cut off his finger and opened a bar. The other one went to school, became a pharmacist and owned a marvelously tidy drugstore. It had a soda fountain and in the only photograph I have he's standing behind the Moxie tap wearing a white paper hat. One of my grandmothers, who outlived them all, died of either a broken heart or diabetes. The other grandmother was sadly senile and died peacefully in her sleep. I have a mania for soap and cologne, hairpins and talc, but so do many of my friends who never had a pharmacy in their past. With the extent of my knowledge I've done okay. I won a cakewalk once, and another time-- at a seaside carnival--a painted plate in the shape of Rhode Island. I don't need a quietus to sleep. I don't need an alarm to wake. All dreams have tragic implications. I have the same one every year: in Sarajevo, a queue of men line up to have their fezzes ironed.   "Mary Ruefle":http://maryruefle.com/ is the author of, most recently, "'Selected Poems'":http://www.wavepoetry.com/index (Wave Books, 2010). She has published 10 books of poetry, a book of prose and a comic book. Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.