In Time a Sort of Grandeur from Richard Wilbur
In time a sort of grandeur haunts the rooms
where you have stood day after day
washing dishes, turning the thermostat down to sixty two
,before the weary climb upstairs to bed.
Or is a kind of failure present peeling off
the cold skein of each successive enterprise gone sour,
flat, deflated: failure with its regal twin the lord of emptiness
that have erected their tents on your living room floor?
Only the white ceiling or the mute door jambs,
bastions of all your days, can describe the actual tenor of the years.
But the dust tracked in on the vinyl kitchen floor, dear one, once
an honest part of the nebula’s bang starting this entire zig zag universe
where you now reside, floats down from old time into this,
your time, and the never ending hollow of time to come.
Such inconsequential particles remain, and because of this,
with it, clinging, a sort of grandeur.