THE MUSEUM ISSUE Linda Pastan   Three Skulls on an Oriental Rug: Cezanne, Oil on Canvas Whose skulls are these, and isn't it dread that informs our pleasure in this canvas? A still life, we're told, is simply the marriage of form and color to create a design—a razzle dazzle circuit between eye and heart. So if the objects are skulls it shouldn't matter, although we each carry our own skeleton with us, skull and all, up the marble staircase and into this gallery. To leach the personal from the abstract is a different kind of death. What we see is more than a brilliant oriental shape bleeding its dense flowery purples and reds under three ovoid objects.     Linda Pastan's twelfth book of poems, Queen of a Rainy Country, was published by Norton in 2006 and is now in paperback. She was Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991-1995 and has been a finalist twice for the National Book Award. In 2003 she won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. credit   Published in Volume 10, Number 1, Winter 2009.   Read more by this author: Linda Pastan: Whitman Issue Linda Pastan Linda Pastan: Wartime Issue Linda Pastan: DC Places Issue Linda Pastan: Evolving City Issue