Choosing Sight

It is a museum. I keep telling myself that
as I lose myself in the tools and workshop
that feels real, down to the dirt and imperfect work.

You are encouraged to touch, and you do.
Lifting this implement, and then that one.
There are no signs to tell you what each one does

and so you deduce, think your way through
like a lover lost in time, half memory,
half imagination, you create a world

that may or may not be true.

It is a museum, but not a museum.
You know both too much and too little,
teaching and wondering all at the same time.

And you are left, half yearning, half in glory
of your thoughts and memory, wishing
your love was with you. Wishing your father

was with you too. He was always a sleuth
of history, an understander of the old ways,
able to think hundreds of years back and see

what you did not, not unlike the way you love,
seeing what is not there, yet is. Beauty
where it is denied by the beheld.

It may or may not be true, this museum
of love, but you choose to believe it
and you are rarely proved wrong.

About this poem

I love living museums. The picture came from one – the Hancock Shaker Museum in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. I love learning and understanding how the work got done, the tools and tradesmen that made things. I am good at figuring out what those tools did, but my father had a genius for it. One of the reasons I miss him.

I see beauty where others don’t, particularly in those I love. It’s a constant battle. “You are beautiful.” I say, “Meh,” they say. A constant battle with no winner because we see what we see, unless we train ourselves to see differently.

So, a poem about history, deciphering, the nature of love and beauty and those lost things in history and love. Poetry is never about one thing.

Be well. Travel Wisely,

Tom