Tongue Lyre

Chorus: A Museum Is Under Construction

50 Chorus: A Museum Is Under Construction Coronations and jousting tournaments. A hundred years to build—in medieval Europe there was no precedent for secular interiors on such a large scale, and the peaked whale ribs of the roof swallow us. The vaulting, more sculpture than roof, is like interlocked and twisted hands. We’ve been there, but now we’re reading books. We sit as though on a lover’s jacket. Our lover could be drawing the Smithsonian museums on the National Mall. Bicyclists and Italian greyhounds pass us with paintbrush shadows. Our lover’s hair would shade the page. This cathedral’s castle glass up there— slashed milky slits and gold-dashed hands of the clock, rosettes where the three and six would be—is not the Tudor Palace, begun in 1514, or the gilded mirror we saw tilting the room above the writing desk and opal-inlay bird-footed chair pushed underneath. People were shorter then, their beds were also shorter—see the canopy bed between the second droop of the velvet 51 ropes, the museum’s conscious effort at consciousness, keeping us away from flowering sedge, and the false colors of the photographed stars, and lunar craters sloping—a black lake— as though hands had pushed and pushed the moon? Let’s pretend we understand things. Now the empty lakes are systems of rays. Now let’s read maps of Jupiter’s satellites or A Beginner’s Guide to Hieroglyphs, drawing them, not what they mean: the vulture’s angle at the back of the head can be explained by how the features in that region behave, vaulting as water fans out, disturbed. ...