Letters to the Museum Docent from One Hundred Years After
I – Spring
I moved in after the moss,
found a place among the relics;
made my bed
in the vellum-soft interior
of some ancient canoe.
I wandered, not so different from the visitors,
from the rivers, the ones that paid
to traipse about the shimmering halls of history,
to study the sterile geometries
of time contained
in plaster and syncopated panic.
Their footsteps echoed,
while mine whisper.
I’m sure the moisture is bad for the artifacts.
Makes me wonder how much energy went in
to keep it out? What cataclysm:
to build a Rube Goldberg so grand
you couldn’t put the tiny blue marble
back at the top once it tumbled all the way down.
II –Summer
Time is the isthmus between then and now.
My family is dead; just like you.
Just like the taxidermy animals rotting in these halls.
So none of this really matters,
unless, I suppose, we all find ourselves
gathered in a new museum
in the far-off future
trying to pick up the pieces.
Can you imagine that? A museum of museums.
How confusing it will be, when they dig up this building
full of artifacts from different time periods.
The data on our own damnation—
the absent trace of action to resolve it.
I’m already confused. The summer heat hurls itself in,
no longer stifled by the aggressive AC.
Moss is growing on everything. The tyrannosaur skeleton
is covered in fungus, small mushrooms bloom from its large
orbital. Its teeth dulled with soft lichen and dust.
My daughter would have loved this place.
Seeing the T-rex like this, she’d call it
a mycological myth— invent a new genealogy,
some strange fungal tale
that I will never hear nor create.
No language for it.
I read somewhere that the average language survives about a thousand years
and I am terrified by that kind of extinction.
Things are moving much faster now.
Lichens are eating the words,
crawling over the plaques, translating
science to sound to nothing.
The hall of music is the worst.
All the uncured animal skins, residues of woodwind spit,
Old language transformed to one older still
in the mouths of fungus.
The morels growing on the neck of the guitar,
rubble garbling the dying breaths of a speaker
playing a song that doesn’t know how to end.
The Stradivarius looks like a shade,
some preternatural being,
black mold mosaic-ing about its shiny spruce veneer.
Sound is different here.
in the softened loam it metamorphoses
The gentle thrum of A-minor turns harsh,
glassy, and cracked. And now, of course,
I’m thinking of Orpheus, how his song changed.
Looking at the mildew-darkened painting,
with Eurydice obscured, He plays
the lyre to the void and the void
listens.
The frame is broken
as if something struck the painting right above his head.
She loved the frames, more than the paintings themselves
something about the woodwork,
the elegance of containment.
A device that might outlast that which it holds.
Even now the Spanish moss clings to those fissures.
III – Autumn
I don’t know why I’m writing to you,
documenting another dying.
Though I suppose that was your profession,
all of ours, really. This act languaging our way in
or out of acceptance, mortality,
the exhibit, the world.
I’m thinking of the atom.
The models we built
just to be proven wrong.
I don’t much like leaving the museum.
Dead leaves dance their way inside anyways,
small wind gusts cyclone about, like benzene rings,
like planetary orbits; like my mind drawing words in circles,
drawing sounds in circles, drawing circles for cycles.
How the leaves turn to detritus.
Detritus, the plaques say, turns to stone.
Stone to mineral, it happens slowly,
this mineralogy, a blend of chemistry,
both nascent and ancient. But you only cared about labeling,
not making. The chart of CO2 levels printed so artfully
laminated polymers preserving the paper.
Its bright color, excessively syllabic,
meaningless without action. It will remain
long after your body decomposes,
long after I compose this.
The violin still sounds the same,
almost better in the mossy acoustics of this space.
The distant caws of the ravens in the aviary,
the gulls circling overhead. The sounds
align themselves in a perfect symphony of decay.
IV – Winter
Haven’t moved for days.
The other wings are too cold.
But, even without power
it turns out, the walls of the hall of anthropology
are quite insulated, a final measure to protect
what could never be protected.
I’m lying in the canoe, an old animal skin pulled over me
It creaks as I turn in my sleep.
I read the whaling plaques
they talk about leviathans,
methods used to hunt them,
names of their hunters.
Never an account of their songs.
Never worship, only war. I pretend
to play whale songs on the moldy violin
Looking for that lonely frequency
where I might be heard.
Longing for the sea.
When I lift the bow from the string,
I wait, and listen and
the silence—
sings.
Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a Greek/Italian-American from Boardman, Ohio. He received his M.F.A. in poetry from the Northeast Ohio MFA program and his B.S. in both chemistry and English from Allegheny College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Scientific American, Fairy Tale Review, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of New Brunswick.
