Weekend Verses.

In the Museum of Lost Objects
 

You’ll find labels describing what is gone:
an empress’s bones, a stolen painting
 
of a man in a feathered helmet
holding a flag-draped spear.
 
A vellum gospel, hidden somewhere long ago
forgotten, would have sat on that pedestal;
 
this glass cabinet could have kept the first
salts carried back from the Levant.
 
To help us comprehend the magnitude
of absence, huge rooms
 
lie empty of their wonders—the Colossus,
Babylon’s Hanging Gardens and
 
in this gallery, empty shelves enough to hold
all the scrolls of Alexandria.
 
My love, I’ve petitioned the curator
who has acquired an empty chest
 
representing all the poems you will
now never write. It will be kept with others
 
in the poet’s gallery. Next door,
a vacant room echoes with the spill
 
of jewels buried by a pirate who died
before disclosing their whereabouts.
 
I hope you don’t mind, but I have kept
a few of your pieces
 
for my private collection. I think
you know the ones I mean.

......Rebecca Lindenberg, “In the Museum of Lost Objects” from Love, an Index.