Studying History

Not the underwater goggles to see
great distances, not the let’s pretend
of the museum’s “Street of Yesteryear,”
its candy’s single stripes in jars, life-sized
dummy at the counter,
stiff collar and apron, eyes skewed to retrieve
his blank goodwill. Nor is it
book after book of the same war
over remembered time, the old nun called it,
speeded up for the test. Wars of different
colors, weaves, and counterweaves,
different surgical instruments, different
agonies via different
far-off blasts, different endlessly
pointless outcomes, different
tiny viruses ingesting
the lungs first, derailing trains there,
breath starting and stopping
at each smoky depot.
         I sat at a desk
where we all sat. I opened
that book of flags. Once a woman took up
a whole half page, looming there,
middle of the 19^th century, absolutely
glacial because happiness is momentary
and eternity is work, the camera
shrouded, laying
its slow black against white until her
terrible face found me.
            Was that
childhood going on? That noise
in the background—half-starved, deranged bird
half “Hallelujah Chorus” sung
by the whole town, bad tenors included? Ache
of cold metal on the playground,
one glove lost forever, night,
hours of it, caught
by a streetlight?
       Which is simply
the past. In that book now, isn’t it?
And a child is writing
his name in the flyleaf, under two or three
other names, the book already underlined,
half-forgotten. Write clearly,
write in ink, the teacher is saying.