Ancestor

Grandmother's grandmother was not
who I thought she was
in broad strokes, wide outlines,
the basic gist: she was less and more.
And I do not know how to tell
which tales of her are true or false.
How close or how far
are your family myths
from some semblance of the real?
Perhaps your visions, like mine,
reach back farther than you thought,
to two or three or four
generations before
is where the source of our images lie:
not doubly great but quadruply
or quintuply or more.
Then again:
maybe our visions of the past
have nothing whatsoever
to do with the facts
but rather with
some psychological truth,
some personal issue or ideal or illness.
They say disease,
like heritage,
runs in the blood,
traceable from dam or sire
to the young, and thence
to the future generations.
I know madness runs in mine,
though I presume not about yours;
but our very acquaintance
makes you suspect, stranger.
After all, ideas are contagious,
whether those come from family, from friends,
from strangers on the internet,
from strangers in the media,
from celebrities who might as well be
family, friends to their followers;
and madness has spread for generations.
It runs in the blood;
it streams from my mind,
unspooling over all I produce
from some source hundreds of years
and a thousand of miles in my past,
from some hole in my head,
orifice or partial trepanation,
from an ancestress
or ancestor or not
who survived long enough
to reproduce at least once
and thus achieved 
evolutionary success.