"Time and the Tilting Earth"

Back barely half a slow century past
this house was built in a yard a yard or so deep.
Beneath the land was a longtime city dump.
Glass and plastic and metal work their way to
the air
and there they tell me things that were long untold
of how we once were, in a world that was.

Here sits someone drinking a Nehi soda,
hearing someone sing on a foot-wide record
wobbling around the pole of a lazy table,
barely a turn a second, one song on a side.

Somebody here bending over the fender
of a car with a running board and no seat belts
gives up on a carburetor and goes into the house
to catch a favorite show on the Philco set.

Here, holding a box the size of an ice bucket,
someone takes a photograph of someone.
Here someone files the colorless picture away
in a wooden box that one day leaves a hinge.

Nobody knows I'm watching. I think Hello,
but even the loudest thought comes back unheard.

Someday, maybe, someone crossing a playground
will touch the toe of a shoe to this fountain pen,
see someone like me writing something,
and wonder a second or two what it might
have been.

Miller Williams is the author, editor, or translator of thirty-four books, including fourteen volumes of poetry, Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms and Making a Poem: Some Thoughts about Poetry and the People Who Write It. Among his many honors are the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship in Poetry from Harvard University, the Poets' Prize, the Prix de Rome for Literature and the Academy Award for Literature, the latter two both from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was inaugural poet for Bill Clinton's second swearing-in as president, and he is the father of three-time Grammy Award–winning singer and songwriter Lucinda Williams.