Lisa Beskin
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Musee Rimbaud
I think of him the wrong way, as if he had never trailed his finger along a brick wall as he
passed. A few streets away, a chestnut-haired woman, not yet diseased, took in the good
evening light, brushed an eyelash from her cheek.
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Warhol Museum
Imagination is OK. The bad news is it belongs to a critic pursing his lips from a really
good seat in the Theater of Cruelty.
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Doris Day Museum
Naturally.
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The H.P. Lovecraft Gallery
Excessive humidity has caused a fine mold to materialize over the books in my study.
How much disgust can there be in poetry? Well, enough.
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The New Freud Museum
What to lay now
at your done stone feet.
A borderline sphinx, duh,
and our own tired brain,
which chatters on like a mind.
Possibly we live everywhere now:
the grave, a toilet, a movie,
your orgasm.
I’m sorry you missed the Internet,
it’s deathless, it represents
nothing. Swiss soldiers
guard the umlaut.
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Bram Stoker’s Dracula Museum
In 1884, Abraham Stoker visited Walt Whitman in Camden, New Jersey. Camden at that
time was a vital center of commerce, with handsome canals and many functional mills.
Whitman writes of Stoker in a letter, quote What a great broth of a boy unquote. Stoker
shook for decades with uncharted tremors, and both Camden and Britain decayed at a
leisurely pace. Whitman is both Dracula and Mina Harker, bending his beautiful neck to
the ravages of his own organism. Dracula himself is either The Return of the Repressed
or a diseased early-late-capitalist real estate market. Anyway, Stoker also one time wrote
a book called The Lair of the White Worm, pretty mediocre. I read not a word of
Whitman until my late twenties.
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Museum for Rosamond Purcell
Old seed packets. Antique looking glass
no one ever expected to cloud.
Wearisome Zen no-thingness can be filled,
and morally.
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Museum of Progress
Yes, hawks circle, of course they circle.
In the days before flight they paced endlessly
with their thumbs tucked in their suspenders,
trying for all the world
to look like Clarence Darrow.