THE MUSEUM ISSUE David Gewanter   Leopard Man Mom once posed as LaGuardia’s girlfriend and smoothed her way past an usher. She gets gas-attacks at lectures, .......and even gave herself a cardiac, worrying which cruise to take. A lifelong scrimmage between ambition and self-doubt has given her a fretful, pestering energy, and a genius .......for quirky triumphs over cabbie, onion, and varicose vein. Working in a museum gift shop she hears that Reagan has been shot, and say, “Hinckley botched the job.” .......Was it that, or was it her rebuking letters—each one signed An ex-Republican so it hurt more? —Something put her on a list. Because a Secret Serviceman comes to question her; .......no sunglasses now, he’s undercover, and checking his notes: “Young Spartacus. Gray Panther. Quote: ‘I’d wear a dynamite girdle and blow us both up. They’d never check me— .......I’m a grandma.’” The bronze breasts of an Ethiopian Goddess almost touch his back—he doesn’t see them, but I do, generations of schoolboys have rubbed her cool nipples all shiny: .......big golden pawns. And I love to see my mother behind the counter, tidying up the fossil fish and reptile rulers, watching him walk up, and whispering a sales blessing on the lot— .......a wizard of retail. He fingers some shark’s teeth, chatting headlines, politics: “Yeah, and what about his cutback on Aid to Dependent Children?” “He’s a stinking lousy miser, that’s what. .......This talking drum, see it? And the husk face—both on sale.” Back and forth they go—he, schooled in Interview Maneuvers; she, assuming a man so full of grudges would want a bargain. .......“So tell me, what should we do about a man like that?” We’ve all heard Mom blurt out Assassination in answer to this. Now she muses, “Do? Well, I don’t know….I guess we could .......vote him out of office…? Which sends him packing, while Mom sits and rests her ankles, safe within her Old Testament justice and shopkeeper’s courtesy. Encased nearby, .......the Leopard Man has seen all this. The Leopard Man, exorcist of his tribe while he wears the skin, who could suffer a vision and kill his whole family, and yet .......be spared because in dreams he sees the enemy clearly. He stoops behind the glass, a fusty mannequin—one eye points at Mom, but the other is painted too far to the side; .......his sight widens, and the world could fall within his gaze.     David Gewanter's poetry books are In the Belly and The Sleep of Reason (both from U. Chicago Press) and the co-edition of Robert Lowell: Collected Poems (FSG & Faber). His new book, forthcoming from Chicago in 2009, is War Bird. Awards include a Hopwood, the Zacharis First Book Prize, Whiting Writer’s Fellowship, Ambassador Book Award (English-Speaking Union), Witter Bynner Fellowship, James Laughlin Prize (finalist), & “Book of the Year” (Contemporary Poetry Review). He teaches at Georgetown University.   Published in Volume 10, Number 1, Winter 2009.   To read more by this author: David Gewanter David Gewanter: Wartime Issue