Homage to an Ancestor

Before I was even conceived, my great grandfather
crafted his own headstone - a task not too different, I imagine,
from whipping up the white boxes he used as real estate
for his bees (he was an apiarist by trade)
or knocking together a boot (he was a cobbler too)
or rigging up the first electric lights
his small town ever knew - not that they would sit beneath
the bulbs, in case liquescent electricity dripped
on their flammable heads. Have I made my point?
Can I now declare that in the mellow Edwardian light
of his eyes I was always destined to fail -
to fail whenever I remember him, this stout little man
who I never met, but who now crawls down
through the piping of generations, and shines
his home-made flashlight into my head,
this man in the gelatin silver photo, the one who is feeding
Frostian stove-length sticks of wood
into a giant buzz saw, and who never lost his hand,
who at the age of twelve, when his father lost his head
and drowned himself in the deep asylum dam,
would cut up a lamb, wrap the red meat in flippant sheets
of wild newspaper, and stack it all on his billy cart
(oh, he made that too) with his baby brother
perched on the back, and go from door to door.
What else did he do that I can employ
to measure the transmundane distance
between his sensational feats and my scratchings?
He carved an angel into the purple shell of an emu's egg.
He pressed floral patterns into the tin of flattened cans.
He made time flux in crippled clocks.
He shore sheep.
He mined eternal gold.
Can you understand
how I will forever be fresh dirt
in the bone sockets of his unearthly eyes -
I who was dumbfounded, and who fumbled
for an answer, when my own son, Samuel,
his namesake, once asked me
if the moon could catch on fire.