Five Thoughts I Had at The Museum.

Five Thoughts I Had at The Museum

by james bezerra

I.

I find a wide dim room of medieval

illuminated manuscripts, so called.

Each one illuminated too by a single lamp,

looking then like beacons

glowing through a dark age.

II.

One must remember that oil money

bought all this history here and built

these buildings around it too.

Millenias’ old black liquid dinosaurs

without which there would be fewer

fortunes in the world. Nor any of these buildings.

Nor this strange city that spreads like strawberry runners

rendered in bituminous pitch through the natural canyons in the hills.

III.

An episode from the Getty family history:

In 1973 a grandson kidnapped in Italy.

A seventeen million dollar ransom refused.

An ear arrives in the mail.

Demand drops to $3.2 mil.

Getty again defers. Decrees: $2.2 only,

the max that’s tax deductible. The IRS

has rules about these things, after all.

IV.

All this beauty bought by business.

All this art afforded by oil.

Dead painters had patrons.

Who are the patrons now,

while painters starve? And so

do the rest of us. How much

money at the top, can our

skinny poor shoulders prop up?

At least they give us these beautiful

places and we’re placated.

V.

Manuscript parchment was made from animal skins.

Skins soaked in lime water to loosen hair and flesh.

Then stretched and scraped and stretched and cut.
These glittering old books once breathed.


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