Dawn opens the accordion of façades,
Formstone and striped awnings of a street
Robber Barons paved to lure the drones
Hived in textile mills along the Falls
A hundred years ago.
In my corner room
With a view of row-house cornices and
The ruined forest on the hill beyond
I keep no clock or mirror.
I want no ticking image to remind
My muse of Time’s progress on this front,
The dial of minutes or my quotidian face.
Nothing temporal excites this place
But daylight, nightfall and the creeping dust,
Metamorphic wind against the glass—
And this eternal Traveler’s calendar,
Months adorned by Currier & Ives.

Faithful as Christmas, the agent of doom
Sends me this quaint scroll from Connecticut.
You know the type: a paper monument
To Mark Twain’s America, the cake-tin
Rococo sweetness of the Gilded Age.
January snow, the horse-drawn sleigh
Leaving the fields trackless, immaculate;
Skaters testing ice on the mill pond;
Children chasing butterflies in May.
If there is a naval battle in July,
You may be sure it happened long ago
When patriots died gladly for their land.
And heavenly smoke-billows from the cannons
Mingle with clouds to hide the fire and gore.
Always a merry steeplechase in spring,
Always the summer sailing on the Bay,
Cloudless, stormless, happy mirror of blue!
Farmhouses in the lusty light of morning,
Twilight stealing the green hills away;
The October perfection of still life—
Grapes and apples light cannot resist
Touching with silver fingers. Always
The glorious landscape larger than the man,
The boy forever fishing the mountain stream,
Innocent, proud, beloved.
America!
Who could forgive or forget your promises,
America as it only could exist
In dreams of men who toiled to barter dreams
For a row-house mortgage, insurance premiums?
Humanity was lost in your vast mood—
A mood-mountain, longed-for, uncertain—
A troubled child that could not come to good,
His passions buried deep under the mountain.
America, who can forgive or forget you?
I revisit the past, I can and I cannot.
Our landscape is stricken, the waterways
Poisoned with chemicals I cannot name,
Our sunsets freaked and stained with iodine.
Nothing looks the same but the pure flame
Of sun at noon. I mourn what was never mine.
The Hartford agent wants to sell me “Life”
For what it’s worth to him and my family.
His calendar’s a subtle tug at my sleeve,
Or not so subtle, now that I study it.
As if the color plates were not enough
To signify the imminence of Heaven,
Here come the phases of the moon:
January frames an infant’s face,
The crescent moon of March a boy of ten
Who, in flowering June, is a young man,
Grey in August, white-haired in November,
Dimples worn to trenches in his cheeks.
Death has made my calendar a mirror,
Flashing the twelve disciples of long life!
Then to remind me of the odds against it,
Death, the engraver, shows me a full moon
Like life in its luminous moment of glory,
Star-crowned, or cloud-adorned, while nearby
Lurks the black mouth of the new moon, saying:

“O live for the glory of the round of light
Crowned by stars in July, or cloud-haunted
In April; but bear in mind the black circle
Of the new moon sailing stealthily among
Your gaudy planets and constellations.
I am the dark round period that waits
Each day for the end of your sentence.”