Nostalgia

Nostalgia


Remember the 1340's?
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
in 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 farriers
for our slang.
These days language seems transparent
a badly broken code.

The 1790's 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
and 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 am 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
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.

Billy Collins

Posted over on Poemhunter