THE MUSEUM ISSUE Andrew Haley   Rauschenberg's Prints Ivana in hand we take our tour in the darkness the monuments are well monumental glowing alabaster globs I told you I need glasses This is a dead city, she insists, and Oh, el obelisco! to my chagrin And though I mutter about the common the mud the empty center in the heart of it all elicit nothing and we are walking the long lawn the cupola behind us and she is uninspired curious at most as to what she’ll tell her father bearded sixty Argentine and communist concerned actually concerned by the bells and whistles of the next ninety-thousand dollar high jinx fostering in future flames but alas not the temple to the god of the people not the temple to Jefferson the god strutting in his temple not Lincoln saturnine at our horizon impress her and the sun is blazing when we slip inside the cool tomblike corridors of the National Gallery and slip down into the basement where the whole fiasco of your century is stamped Gemini to Gemini and spiraling true to the innocence of matter little found things antiquated smiles and Russia’s domes seized in silhouette to a sharper oblivion than time with man allows a scrip of cuttings and impressions fixed in imperfect surety to the haze that swallows every century and in front of this Ivana’s rapt Robert Rauschenberg you are a real American hero Andrew Haley is the author four novels, the most recent of which is Beggars Opera. His Poem to Get Started was praised by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins, judge of the 2006 Utah Writers Contest. Other poems have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Quarterly West, and GoodFoot. Haley’s translations of Cocteau, Rimbaud, Li Po, Neruda and others have appeared in or are forthcoming from Cipher and Zone.   Published in Volume 10, Number 1, Winter 2009.