I'm still not used to writing 2001 on checks.
In my generation, 2001 symbolized the future.
And now here it is, and it's like flipping by us a day
at a time.
But back in the 20th century--
and it seems odd even to say that.
Back in the 20th century, which seemed
to be a very long century to me.
I think it will go down ultimately
as one of the longest centuries.
And so much took place.
There's like skateboarding, World War
I. You probably have your own memories that
are more prominent.
But we did have a habit in the 20th century
of dealing with the past.
And we dealt with it by slicing it into decades
and providing these decades with a kind of personality.
Like the '50s and the '60s and the '70s.
And then there was a kind of enforced nostalgia,
a kind of enforced bittersweet feeling
about the passing of these personality-infused periods,
as if we would want to be stuck in one of them
in a kind of perpetual loop.
So the poem is kind of takeoff on that habit.
And it's called "Nostalgia."
"Remember the 1340s?
We were doing a dance called the catapult. You
always wore brown, the color craze of the decade.
And I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates and needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon.
And at night, we would play a game called "find the cow".
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.
Where has the summer of 1572 gone?
Brocade and sonnet marathons were the rage.
We used to dress up in the flags of rival baronies
and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor, we were all doing the struggle.
While your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of ferriers for our slang.
These days, language seems transparent,
a badly broken code.
The 1790s will never come again.
Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals
without speaking.
Our collars were high.
Our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive.
Or even dead.
I'm very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901, if only for a moment.
Time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps.
Or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941.
Or at least let me recapture the serenity of last month
when we picked berries together and glided
through afternoons in a canoe.
Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light flash
off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver, the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water rushing over
the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future,
that place where people are doing a dance we cannot
imagine, a dance whose name we can only guess."