When I Walk out of the Museum

When I walk out of the museum
 The wall of sudden light makes me crinkle up my nose
 And standing, coat half on, between marble columns
 I sneeze into the wind
 When I walk out of the museum
 I have centuries of dust behind my eyes
 I hunch a little bit
 From the culminated weight of all these other peoples' ideas
 I see a tipped over garbage can blowing in the street
 When I walk out of the museum
 I think about a snorkeler surfacing tangled in kelp
 That is me: writhing, wild attention, glancing around
 The huge museum doors behind me slam
 And I flinch
 In all of these brief flashes of momentary clarity
 The emptiness that cuts through is like
 A bowl beneath the sky
 Empty, not yet pregnant
 Fertile, without form
 It terrifies me, the raw possibility
 And I want to go back inside
 But when I walk out of the museum
 Everything I see seems rippling and alive
 On a freezing January day
 The museum
 And the garbage
 And the internet
 And the constellations
 All collapse into a heap
 And light floods out
 From this compost pile