The Anti-Grief. Marianne Boruch

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      The Museum of Silence

      Those Poor Clares must wonder why the racket

      louder than usual, three-euros-a-pop

      tourists queueing up outside,

      weekends the convent on pause.

      It’s the noise in their heads, the old nun

      might say with what’s left

      in her head, the girlhood part: war,

      a low-flying plane, the loud, hoarse agony

      of cows shattered from above into petal by

      red petal, garish sprays in grass

      north of these olive groves.

      (Museum of Silence as secret or

      scent, day of misjudgment,

      Italy, the baffling website, our

      stop-start train to Fara Sabina.)

      Quiet is what’s after, the old nun

      tells the young nun who has

      an edge, that eye thing, she has a look.

      This too I invent: is it vanity or just

      the old woman in wonder, going on

      so vividly the long-ago boy in that cockpit

      can’t even have a thought, he’s so scared.

      And the younger nun: So now it’s

      forgive us their trespasses?

      Not out loud. In her head. Belief can narrow

      for good like that. What’s left is

      a lever, a simple jack of amazement to

      pry open the very first museum on earth,

      a sanctuary for the muses.

      Of course. From the Greek mουσεῖον,

      part cemetery. Latin’s closer,

      mūsēum, its small banquet room to keep

      the dead living, a spot for reverent

      frolic and grief. The Ancients

      mourn, loving the lost off to their

      out-of-body nowhere or somewhere,

      eating with them one last time.

      The original church-basement lunch

      after the funeral, I suppose.

      And those ladies who

      toil among the fruit salad, ham spread,

      the muted voices—

      O long-robed muses of oldest days,

      (for Poetry lyric and epic and sacred,

      for Music, History, Dance, et al) come hither!

      Even you, wordless stricken one

      called Tragedy, the start over,

       dark forever thus

      in such places, that bright

      moth bitten-blind ring of leaves you wear.