Night Museum

for KP

It fills the window like a picture framed,
fine-printed feathers on a glass-walled cave -
an owl that took the solid pane for air,
astonished breast and wings a five-point star,
like fire engraved in frost, a comrade caught
on camera at the instant of the shot.

The pre-dawn galleries are darkened fields
where objects yield their store of buried heat:
faint pencil markings in the great composer's
hand, like thought in flight, the poet-soldier's
notebook and his heart stopped watch,
the lava casts, the legendary shroud.

Almost the body, the thing itself outstretched
but with the life withdrawn, back into the woods.