Rebecca Lindenberg currently holds a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellowship. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in
The Believer, Colorado Review, No Tell Motel, Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, POOL and elsewhere, and she is finishing a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah.
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In the Museum of Lost Objects
You’ll find labels describing what is gone:
An Empress’s bones, a stolen painting
of a man in a feathered helmet
holding a flag on a spear.
A vellum gospel dissolved in lye
would have sat on this pedestal,
this glass cupboard could keep the first
salts carried back from the Levant.
To help us comprehend the scale
of what we do not have, huge rooms
sit empty of their wonders – the Colossus,
Babylon’s Hanging Gardens and
in this gallery, empty shelves for all
scrolls burnt at Alexandria.
I’ve petitioned the curator, my love,
and he has acquired an empty chest
representing all the poems you will
now never write. It will be kept
with blank folios of Keats’ unconceived
work, Shelley’s unperfected ideals,
Hart Crane’s vanished genius, all
Rimbaud could have penned but didn’t.
Next door to the poet’s display
an empty room echoes with the spill
of buried jewels whose pirate died
before disclosing their whereabouts.
I hope you don’t mind but I have kept
a few of your pieces
for my private collection. I think
you know the ones I mean.
Quo Vadis
“I think by feeling. What is there to know?
I learn by going where I have to go.”
-Theodore Roethke
The road back to Rome unscrolls
around mountain and parapet.
I am telling Robin an apocryphal story
he could not care less about
but will remember later. You steer
close to the center line. Back to Rome
to be crucified, my story ends,
Upside down. At the bottom of our hill.
In the parking lot above San Pancrazio,
on my daily route to market,
Quo Vadis appears across a billboard
photograph of a woman’s calves, seamed
into fishnets, black stilettos. Where do you
think you’re going? The film ad seems
to answer its own question: Where
does one wear fishnets and stilettos, if not
an execution? Now you ask me
to pull out a map. What road
are we even on? You want to know.
Does it matter, I joke, Where do all roads lead?
I unfold heavy paper towards our last
known location. Do you know where we’re going yet?
Always such urgency. Such muscular
impatience. Not yet, I reply. Just drive.
