“We were at Deauville…
at Lago di Garda…Baden-Baden…Biarritz…”

And I read on,
looking through old letters and journals
at the Bibliothèque nationale,
doing research for a TV documentary
on the Last Summer Before WWI,
here on a cold gray rainy winter day in Paris,
at the beginning of the new millennium
and another war in Iraq:

“…We were taking the waters…
A festive atmosphere,
lawn-games and charades, flirtations.
Distractions keeping reality at bay…
Waltz music from the spa orchestra in the park,
and the chimes of glasses on silver trays
as attendants passed by with the famous water…
And the glittering waves of voices and laughter
flowed on, all evening, all around us…”

And I keep reading,
lost in lines of elegant ornate script
in faded-out ink on monogramed pastel stationery,
and in awkward block letters, some in faint pencil,
on torn pieces of tattered thin paper:

“…that summer, I first went to work
at the factory…joined my father in the mines…
left school for a secure job as a street cleaner…
I was on the Champs Elysée and wondered why
there was such panic and commotion,
then I saw the newspaper headline
of the Archduke’s assassination…

Later that week, war was declared…
It was the end of the world we had known,
only we didn’t know any of that then…
We thought it would all be over by the end of summer.”

How through the scrim of time,
words pull us in
and what once was rushes back in,
resurfaces,
in the tidal surf of the present–