Museum

to her room again and again. When the body dies slowly,

the mind lives a museum version.

When Eisenhower was president everyone had a mother,

Mamie wore her serviceable pearl necklace and

nobody needed to be gorgeous because

there was work to do and the pill hadn’t been invented

so action and consequence were one,

and the sidewalk was cracked. Trees

and houses were huger than they would ever

be again, tadpoles squiggled, and the rest took care

of itself. I don’t know when it was

that the mighty structures began to live inside me

and I myself became the nation and the wind

began howling and the gut of the nation

began rumbling. I will tell you a story:

Once upon a time there were world wars,

the Korean War, there was McCarthy,

there was terror and confusion, there was Al Capone,

even, and it seemed that would never end.

How would it end? It ended

in newspaper words, an official version gathered

like a squirrel’s nest in winter, a blob on a branch

so high it seemed impossible. Even

in Eisenhower’s time: squirrels. And you wonder

how long the experiment of your life will continue

while water quivers and wood rots

and the museum is erected, everything’s explained

on a plaque. “Don’t be scared,” we’d said to each other

in the dark, but nothing happened

except this living, this flex of dark and light.

And Eisenhower, bald, canonical, moved far out of reach,

and the woman wandering the hallway,

opening door after door, is checking to see if