Look I want to write a poem about a dying town’s last museum Admittedly there weren’t many museums there to begin with But however few there may have been this museum is the last I want to write about the curator who clasps his hands Behind his back as he walks through the rooms he curates A man who’s always had an eye for beauty while being A quite ugly man himself something he seems almost proud Of because the story is in line with his sense of himself As being something of a Quasimodo whose duty it was To ring the bells of Notre-Dame while for our curator His is to renew these rooms every few months for The old women who totter in on Tuesdays to walk one Another through them and who will make some comment About there having not been much of a change since The last time they visited but simply switch a few paintings Around he’s learned and they act like they’ve never been To the museum before so new does everything seem to them And I want to write about the sad way he goes to the window To gaze out at the yard o one of those rainy October days After Halloween after all the leaves have fallen and are Beginning to blacken under the trees so that they resemble The scales on the back of a great black fish I want The poem I want to write about him to include the day When he was a boy walking home from school with another Boy who all of a sudden stopped and blandished his Penis sort of wagging his hips to make it sway without Once touching it and they never said anything though They’d both grown up to be classmates through Junior high and high school and furthermore how He’d seen this man again though no it would be More accurate to say he saw a man who he’d known as a boy At a reunion and even then when you’d think they could Slap each other on the back after a few drinks and one Of them say Hey remember that time you or I but no they Just stood there talking about how rough the town was looking a As if they were standing by its bedside him wondering Whether he remembered and if he did whether He was wondering whether he remembered and remembering Was wondering whether he remembered and there is a painting He quite hates and that I want to put in the poem too And how often he thinks of taking it down from where It hangs and breaking it over his knee or taking an axe to it And burning the pieces watching the canvas curling up Before the flames even reach it and the paint panicking beginning To run in psychedelic colors the painting is of an old lady In a ruffled lace collar holding a poodle on her lap he hates The way the poem would say the painter seems to have tried To suggest a connection between the lady’s lacy ruffles And the poodle’s curls what would it even mean if one grants that They are connected it was one of those lazy conclusions He tried not to make a difficult task in that dying town Like trying to keep your head above water by treading With your arms locked against your sides but then one day The day this poem will take place on he realizes what it is The painter has been trying to say to him through the painting All these years of his tenure as curator that there is No essential difference between the lady and the poodle Because each is a consequence of the other and so are Equally incapable of surviving in the other’s absence Hence their codependence it almost didn’t matter He realizes who is holding whom and this is the part Of the poem where he should remember the day The boy who exposed himself to him exposed himself To him should remember it was snowing and that he was Worried that the boy was cold and right here is where He should remember the way the boy had looked away