Poem

Those Poor Clares must wonder why the racket

louder than usual, three-euros-a-pop tourists queuing up outside, weekends the convent on pause.

It’s the noise in their heads, the old nun might say with what’s left in her head, the girlhood part: war,

a low-flying plane, the loud hoarse agony

of cows shattered from above into petal by red petal, garish sprays in grass north of these olive groves.

(Museum of Silence as secret or scent, day of misjudgment,

Italy, the baffling website, our

stop-start train to Fara Sabina.)

Quiet is what’s after, the old nun tells the young nun who has an edge, that eye thing, she has a look.

This too I invent: Is it vanity or just an old woman in wonder, going on so vividly the long ago boy in that cockpit

can’t even have a thought, he’s so scared.

And the younger nun: So now it’s forgive us their trespasses?

Not out loud. In her head. Belief can narrow for good like that. What’s left is a lever, a simple jack of amazement to pry open the very first museum on earth,

a sanctuary for the muses.

Of course. From the Greek mουσεῖον, and part cemetery. Latin’s closer, mūsēum, its small banquet room to keep

the dead living, a spot for reverent frolic and grief. The Ancients mourn, loving the lost off to their

out-of-body nowhere or somewhere,

eating with them one last time.

The original church basement lunch after the funeral, I suppose.

And those ladies who toil for us among the fruit salad, ham spread, the muted voices—

O long-robed muses of oldest days

(for poetry lyric and epic and sacred, for Music, History, Dance, et al.), come hither! Even you, wordless stricken one

called Tragedy, the start over, dark forever thus in such places, that bright

moth bitten-blind ring of leaves you wear.