Illustration from James Thurber's "The Owl in the Attic"

The Century At Hand

by Ethan Gilsdorf

I do not live there, in the century at hand,
where grace and tone and shade are better,
where the years gracefully bend
around the ends of the various eras.
I have no classic anything, no horse,
no mahogany coach to carry me
into the rich chocolate of their eyes,
into the soft undergrays and sepia
gathered where frayed tunics meet their feet.

When I visited the fourteenth century,
I took my camera, framed my false nostalgia,
sucking up monuments and history
because I had no depth.
I watched the fools like me crowd
the refurbished things, rediscovering
the reconstructed cobbled streets.
The chateau smoother
than the promise of the actual.

It's stupid to ask,
Where are the desiccated dogs,
the happy peasants spattered with horseshit,
the hoof sound receding along stone?
Like the others, I adjust. I eat my pizza
and clutch my souvenirs, thinking back
to the museum, where Breugel had it right,
letting a blackened hawk in the upper left complain
all it wanted or flap away from the frame.