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Poetry
by Jeffery Donaldson
MUSEUM
Subway, in the middle of my commute,
I found myself in a dark corner.
The line vanished into the underground
in two directions, the clack and crow-screech
of steel wheels echoed in recession
of the just missed five-o-nine
from the tunnel’s depths. Museum Station.
A chilled solitude widened around me
and water-drops pooled in mimicked snips
between the rails below. The ceiling lamps’
subdued fluorescence seemed to cast no shadows
and were like peering through green water.
Exhibits from the ROM in glass cases
with aboriginal wooden masks descended
like messengers from the real world above,
whose outsize faces gestured witness and alarm
in the apocalyptic style of indigenous myth.
Farther up, the February dusk
was tawny, the air tasteless and dull
as pewter plate. Fog had moved in on
Old Vic’s scrubbed-stone but now vague
turrets uncobbling upwards to the last
vanished spire, as though parting illusion
from the epigraph above the stairway arch,
still insisting, after these twenty years,
that the truth would set me free.
All gone up in a mist now, as far
as I could see. I pictured them above,
the Burwash quad, Pratt, and residence,
whose faux-gothic walls hold the city at Bay
like the brim of an empty cup, and where
the mind-set of college years, memories
of what unwritten words, burn perpetually
as in a crucible. I wonder now had I known,
those years hiding my fidgets, of the tics
Touretters spend their days trying to release,
or heard of how the obsessive’s repetitions
grind every last impulse to its death,
would I have finished more, managed
the regimental habitus and got things done?
Too skittish by far to do as that passage
from Faust always roared mockingly I should,
from its perch on the cork board above my desk,
Settle your studies! and sound the depths
of that thou wilt profess. Get real! I still
have the welts from the nightly tongue-lashing.
But now school’s out at last, and the long ghostly
hours of doodling, daydreams, lectures, lessen.
The students pouring from Northrop Frye Hall
slushed in out of the fog in private directions
escalating down into the commuter scrimmage
towards the platform. And that brought it on.
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