I Will Love the Twenty-First Century
Dinner was getting cold. The
guests, hoping
for quick,
impersonal, random
encounters
of the usual sort,
were sprawled
in the bedrooms. The
potatoes
were hard, the beans
soft, the meat—
there was no meat. The
winter
sun had turned
the elms
and houses yellow;
deer were moving down
the road
like refugees; and in
the drive-
way, cats
were warming
themselves on the hood of a car. Then a man
turned
and said to me:
“Although I love
the past, the dark of
it,
the weight of it
teaching us noth-
ing, the loss of it,
the all
of it asking for
nothing, I will
love the twenty-first
century
more,
for in it I see
someone in bath-
robe and slippers,
brown-eyed and poor,
walking through snow
without
leaving so much as a
footprint behind.”
“Oh,” I said, putting
my hat on, “oh.”
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