Smithsonian

There’s rain again like you wouldn’t believe

raining into lake America:

the oldest scripts coiling away

in cuttlefishy ink: radio

sermons and vaudeville

bound in indigo covers. The statues

aim their rifles

like collapsed umbrellas—

only some men are waterproof.

It is a truth held to be

self-evident. Nothing holds truth

as clearly as a bucket.

The night workers believe

in trash bags and kitty litter;

a torn umbrella to shield

Darwin’s famous godwits.

There are scripts for emergency,

not slow sinking. The statues

watch impassively. The news

blares a sermon about arks

and wickedness. The dry,

in the sermon, are righteous.

The sequins unglue like truth

from Dorothy’s famous slippers:

red spotlit statues. It’s unclear

how we’ll ever get home,

how the belief in home

became a kind of drowning.

Postscripts promise freedom,

sump pumps, umbrellas.

One says, May you have an accident

shaped like an umbrella,

which could mean a storm

like a God-breathy sermon

or wind like wind

will blow us inside out,

waterlogged scripts bleeding

their boldest letters. If the truth

is a raft, what’s the river?

One worker says, We’ve come to believe

the best museum would be a closed box

[holding statutes, CCC poems, “Sittin On the Dock

of the Bay,” and statues] with no windows

or doors. It’s mostly a joke,

like umbrellas on blustery days.

It’s never been a good country

to be left as an object. The doors are sealed

with packing tape and sermons,

yet water ripples the velvet

theater seats. There are truths

the wet vacs can’t dry: antebellum

porcelain with tiny scripted-filigree

initials. Someone handpainted

that script, dreaming

of hush harbors, mute trees

like statues. That this country

has always been a rainstorm

is a truth. Also, all museums leak

history. Someone sells umbrellas.

Someone builds a plastic-bag

dam, saves declarations,

sermons. Someone sells cherry-red

flood barriers; pedals the belief

each American is born

with an umbrella, unscripted

freedom to open it. No matter

what you believe, the museum’s

closing early—ankle-deep, waist-deep, statue-

deep in rain’s only true sermon.