I like this very much. Ostensibly a study of a place you manage using the
childhood memories of your father and then the mummy to draw out a
procession of generations and then extend it through your own mortality and
you manage very well with a controlled and unemotional nicely distanced
tone. This a good poem . Be very pleased Arthur.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Horwood" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 11:32 AM
Subject: New sub: Museum


Musuem

This is Museum Street, where my father once worked,
where I visited as a toddler, can just recall
sun on linoleum and a high window
with a cream-painted sill.
On my way to the British Museum
I fancy my feet strike the same stones
my father´s did all those years ago.

Inside, the building mimics well the maze of history.
How easy to lose one´s way and end up here
among the school groups and Egyptian mummies.
Behind a glass a corpse reclines,
its sinews pulled clear of the flesh,
like a joint from the oven, visible to the bone,
skin the colour of cooked meat,
dry and shrivelled from too long in the fridge.

Its hair reminds me of the coarse tufts of mane
on my childhood rocking horse after years of use,
its lips pulled into a grin of ecstasy or pain,
the expression´s meaning forever lost.

The children crouch about the floor
and fumble with paper and pencil
after the shape of a limb, the line of the grin.
Not knowing the world its empty eyes looked on
I cannot guess what it would have made of this
and instead see myself in a glass case
in some unimaginable millennium,
all my secrets hidden in my sockets from observing eyes.

With a shuffling of papers and feet, the class departs,
leaving a memory to be recalled, perhaps,
forty years hence by the word `museum´
or dusty sunbeams through a skylight.
Outside and walking Museum Street in the declining sun
I am unable even to say which building he worked in,
through which door his back disappeared, repeatedly.




Mike