Eighty years ago, rural E.B. White imagined
The weirdness of a future world in which
The head of a man who was in New York
Would appear to be talking to you from a box
On your farmhouse parlor floor. Born to that
World, before I turned thirty I added
The oddity of sitting to type glowing messages
To persons then responding in real time,
Whatever real time might be, from the literal
Other side of the world, say, New Zealand,
Instantaneous communication between
Their past and my future a day ahead of me.
By now, in this even newer past, those days are
Nothing, too, are quaint as E.B. White’s dread
Fascination with the coming world of TV.
This afternoon for an hour, whatever an hour
Might mean, body and daughter smiled
And made faces at each other, miles
And miles and hundreds of miles hence,
Discussing a game daughter was playing
At the same annihilated instant on a third screen.
I’ll tell you a secret, E.B. There is no dislocation.
There never was any location in the first place,
And it’s the science of the fiction that breaks
Down the old solid dream. Here we were always be.
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