He gazes at the old pictures

in the dusty history text
and sometimes he wants
to jump into them
and see for himself the
crimson aftermath of
Antietam, even at the risk
of destroying the last remnants
of his childish romance
with that distant carnage.
He wants to
rub shoulders with the Hasidim
on the sidewalks
of 1900 New York,
to smell the stench
of the horse-infested streets,
and to know that these people
were real, that the day
in which they lived
was as physical and as warm-blooded
as his is.
He wants to feel the breeze
coming off of San Francisco Bay
on that day in 1890 when the town
was still raw and pulsing
with the energy of naked money lust
and thick-muscled power.
It's all right there,
if only he could plunge into them
and look around for a while.
The only condition he asks for is for
the portal to stay open long enough
for him to grab the edge of his desk
and pull himself back into
the 3-D cinema
of right now;
he wants only to be a visitor,
not the guy standing
second from the left
for someone else
to wonder about.