...by the guttering hearth, a ring of somber-gabardined grandpas

plays dominoes. Their stubble picks up the flicker like filaments

still waiting for the bulb or the phone to be invented. Even their

coughs, their phlegms, are in an older language. They move...

from A History of Civilization
the Miltonic Albert Goldbarth
in Poetry Daily January 28, 2003