I'm puzzling my way through the zigzag side streets

of the early hours when silently, unfeasibly,

the city museum springs up against the stars,

its Franco-Flemish elevations meticulously etched

- or so it seems: you're never sure with dreams.

 

The place is closed of course so I pass alone

through its shadowed passages

like an ancient lost soul struggling to visualise

the plan inscribed inside the coffin's lid.

 

Here are the fossils and the flints, the ghost of a boat,

a shrivelled spade fished from a castle well.

But this is not what I've come to find.

 

Beyond the final door, submerged in fuzzy oceanic

light, I can just make out encrusted frames,

the glow of oils, distant, phosphorescent.

 

The pinkish sky behind the grieving widow's head

is just discernible, so too the moonlit

squint of shoreline from the grotto's mouth.

 

The glory of The Orrery, though, is blackened almost beyond recall

but for the children aglow with the weirdness of it all.

We watch them watch the dainty moons and planets

dancing orbits through their toy immensity,

and if the sun is totally eclipsed by the woman's silhouette,

we still receive the warmth of its touch

simply by reflection from the children's faces, radiant,

radiant as the faces of angels.

 

You want it to go on and on, you want the children to go on gazing,

drawing grace and wonderment and fun - as though these gifts

could be absorbed from sunshine alone

through some propitious vitamin.

 

Time runs out.  The picture pixelates

suddenly, too soon: I'm pitched into zero-gravity

spinning helplessly for a moment or so

until the clock's tick checks my vertigo.

 

Way over the roof the stars have moved on.

The museum's gone.

 

The texture of the thing, like a scent, evanescent, lingers briefly.

The meaning's already light years away

and receding   per second      per second

exponentially.

 

 

© Anthony John Cooper 2007.  Reproduced with permission of the author