Saturday, July 4, 2015


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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