The epoch of a street car drawn by horses,
The organ grinder and his monkey.
Women with parasols. Little kids in rowboats
Photographed against a cardboard backdrop depicting
     an idyllic sunset
At the fairgrounds where they all went to see
The two-headed-calf, the bearded
Fat Lady who dances the dance of the seven veils.

And the great famine raging through India…
Fortunetelling white rat pulling a card out of a shoebox
While Edison worries over the lightbulb,
And the first model of the sewing machine
Is delivered in a pushcart
To a modest white-fenced home in the suburbs,

Where there are always a couple of infants
Posing for the camera in their sailors’ suits,
Out there in the garden overgrown with shrubs.
Lovable little mugs smiling faintly toward
The new century. Innocent. Why not?
All of them like ragdolls of the period
With those chubby porcelain heads
That shut their long eyelashes as you lay them down.

In a kind of perpetual summer twilight…
One can even make out the shadow of the tripod and the 
     black hood
That must have been quivering in the breeze.
One assumes that they all stayed up late squinting at the stars,
And were carried off to bed by their mothers and big sisters.
While the dogs remained behind: 
Pedigreed bitches pregnant with bloodhounds.