Three Years On

"Nothing has changed; nothing's the same"

We revisit a curiously themed
Motel among high desert hot springs
That steam, copiously, in bronze sun:
Our "pilot room" has a poster for Wings,

Amid a vaguely thirties motif,
Biplanes and LIFE magazine covers,
A crew lounge sign by the kitchenette,
A wooden model plane that hovers

Over the decrepit swamp cooler,
And, bizarrely enough, framed postcards,
Of early twentieth-century writers,
An old Mark Twain, a young Evelyn Waugh.

Those covers from LIFE are what gets me.
Over the toilet, from 1939,
A "girl guide" grinning at the World's Fair
Who, if still living, is about eighty-nine,

And, across from her, a handsome airman
In uniform, just home from the war,
Only a few short years later.
The covers look so similar 

They could be for back-to-back issues,
But in between them lay a world deranged,
And it haunts me for no good reason,
That so much of nothing has changed.