They are tearing down the oldest hotel
in Spring Lake, New Jersey. People sat here
in wicker chairs, reading Henry James,
when women wore long dresses and high shoes
and talked to men in hard straw hats and blazers
of motorcars and Egypt. Out of their sight,
men with large hands and unbreakable words
complained to women who never slept enough.
People came here when men in medicine wagons
sold bottles of dark elixir to women who waited
in small, fictitious towns, in houses with fringes,
rocking upstairs for days, the last drop gone.
Cars and aeroplanes and moving pictures,
adventures of goggles and boots, made here once
a surety as bright as a pale wine
caught by candlelight and nearly as brief.
Then they died, but that was different, too.
They died knowing that love by vulgar love,
barring only the yawn of a God grown bored,
eternal generations would bloom above them.
When the structure someone supposes here
to take the place of this hollow hotel
is pulled apart, say a hundred years,
someone will say, maybe, thinking of us:
they were like this and that, read such and such;
they talked of these matters in those old chairs;
they never quite believed that we would be here
recalling the dead, pulling their buildings down.
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