Lise Latreille, John's Hand (photograph)
has limited hours mostly
it’s sealed shut in the shade
near the Pest House
where smallpox victims
languished on sand floors
near the Station House
with its steamer trunks
and little plaques of doom:
“found dead on Rail Road
3 miles from here Frozen.”
On the porch the hot wet
air licks you like a tongue
and there’s a miniature house
with a copper roof
for cats though none are around.
Glass display: a “cooling casket”
like a big picnic basket
to carry the unembalmed dead.
A sign promises a “Christian
vault” nearby, a gift shop
with “Died and Gone to Heaven” honey
from white bee boxes
on the grounds where rare species
of roses grow in rows
among the dead.
Open the door to the Mourning Museum!
Let me in to weep
for everything I’ve lost and broken,
for every aunt, every pet,
for my grandfather killed
by the mines, for my nana’s
lost mind and the cut-down
trees of my childhood,
for the sideways slits
of goats’ eyes
for clusters of figs
and their jeweled caves,
for childhood dissipating
like mist from a lake.
Let me in
to rend my clothes,
to murmur like water
at its first source, to touch
the brooches made of hair,
the ink of the catalogued dead.