Old buildings are time machines.
Clean out a closet and find a box of dot-matrix paper:
Tear the perforations to hear the ancient printer’s echoes,
Its primitive lines like kindergarten drawings
To our Michelangelo color laser.
If you try, you can still smell the ink of the Risograph.

Arrive one Monday, reach for the light switch–
All muscle memory now–only they’ve replaced the ancient switch
With a dimmer that looks like a panel from Star Trek.
It will take weeks to unlearn that one.

Once, an earthquake shook the building:
You thought it was the COW–the cart on wheels,
Behemoth laptops replaced now by slim student devices.
When the heat kicks on, you can almost smell the fear
Of students crammed in hallways for school-wide lunch
Back when midterm and final exams loomed,
Their chatter now replaced by quiet pacification of cell phones.

If you blink fast, you might catch a glimpse of a sea of masked faces
And startle that you lived through what you’ve already repressed,
Then smile remembering the first time we saw each other smile again.

There is a time capsule buried outside.
Who knows if we’ll be around when they open it?
But there are other ways to travel through time:
Walk down a newly-polished hallway in August,
Let the smell of decades bring you back from summer dreams
To echoing anachronisms:
The clank of lockers, the shuffle of pencil skirts,
Fifties sci-fi dreams of artificial intelligence impossibly far—fifty,
A hundred years away—
Then turn to see the glow of screens and Apple watches,
Entire textbooks invisibly contained, eons of knowledge in a back pocket,
The wisdom of the world weighing nothing. •