print previewback FLEDA BROWN
Museum
Streaming-hair woman wanders the hallway
in flowered nightgown, Where is my family?
Where is my mother? When will they come? Led back
to her room again and again. When the body dies slowly,
the mind lives a museum version.
When Eisenhower was president everyone had a mother,
Mamie wore her serviceable pearl necklace and
nobody needed to be gorgeous because
there was work to do and the pill hadn’t been invented
so action and consequence were one,
and the sidewalk was cracked. Trees
and houses were huger than they would ever
be again, tadpoles squiggled, and the rest took care
of itself. I don’t know when it was
that the mighty structures began to live inside me
and I myself became the nation and the wind
began howling and the gut of the nation
began rumbling. I will tell you a story:
Once upon a time there were world wars,
the Korean War, there was McCarthy,
there was terror and confusion, there was Al Capone,
even, and it seemed that would never end.
How would it end? It ended
in newspaper words, an official version gathered
like a squirrel’s nest in winter, a blob on a branch
so high it seemed impossible. Even
in Eisenhower’s time: squirrels. And you wonder
how long the experiment of your life will continue
while water quivers and wood rots
and the museum is erected, everything’s explained
on a plaque. “Don’t be scared,” we’d said to each other
in the dark, but nothing happened
except this living, this flex of dark and light.
And Eisenhower, bald, canonical, moved far out of reach,
and the woman wandering the hallway,
opening door after door, is checking to see if
America has finally come back from its long, long trip. 
Museum
Picnic, with Geese
Stump