My Love, I've Petitioned the Curator Who Has Acquired an Empty Chest Representing All the Poems You Will Now Never Write

Sunday we drove to Cleveland. We'd been through Cleveland once, sort of, 271 to 90, on one of our Planet college visit trips. That one was Oberlin to Kenyon to Hamilton to Allegheny. You know, the one when we met Landru

and Ilse at a Ponderosa in Meadville. People can vouch. Here's what we do when we visit Planet: we take long drives. We've done east and southeast and south and not southwest and west and northwest (not much) and north but not northeast. We decided to go to Cleveland and see the Cleveland Museum of Art.







So cool, the drive, the museum, the day, one of my best days ever. HEY! so I've got new images to make a new header along the lines of the current header. If you see any in the above slideshow you think should be included please give me a description and tell me the second count, I'll add it to a batch of new headers. Or not, you telling me, me creating the header. Also too, the bottom photo, proof that I have the ears of Dr Sevrin, and who the fuck uses sillyass Star Trek allusions anyway?

IN THE MUSEUM OF LOST OBJECTS

Rebecca Lindenberg

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.