I’m organizing a field trip to the Museum
of Windows of the World. I hear that if you look through them
you will see what they saw when they were part of a wall,
the shimmering lens that records a building’s vista,
every bright sky and bird strike they looked out on.
In addition, the Optical wing features frames
presented as if in their natural settings,
when they were part of glasses, when they were part of a face
—mounted on wax heads made from the death masks of miniature
dead moons. There is a witness encased in the silica.
The scientists we have hired, extracting the translucent
cinema caught in the invisible, all that they’ve learned
is that this process can not be reproduced
in mirrors. Mirrors hold our facial refuse tight,
unwilling to let go. Like metal in the microwave
their elements are resistant to our impatience.