Harvard Museum of Natural History

We drive hours to see the flowers,

     the bush poppy, the common broom,

the realism of the evening primrose

     the Blaschkas assembled with wires & slivers

of luminescent glass. Economic botany,

     the words the artists used to articulate

the nature of their work, forging

     their own versions of the certainties

of matter, picture perfect lupins & pitcher plants,

     their insides removed & exposed,

made artificial, splayed open for the viewer,

     the naked stamens, the drooping anthers,

a grain of pollen magnified to a scale fifty times

     its original size. In a nearby room,

we find the new collection of Rockefeller beetles,

     the centerpiece in an exhibition

on arthropods, the horde of insects the banker

     kept in the “beetle chamber” of his sprawling

New York estate, the scarabs & the stags,

     the weevils & the jewels arranged by

the logic of a color wheel attuned to the obsessions

     of the human eye. Bloody reds,

emerald greens, the muddy browns of the stuffed

     bear displayed in the wing containing

an entire forest, an image that drags vision towards it,

     the jaw wrenched open into the guise

of threat camouflaged against the instructive diorama

     on the intricate ecology of the caribou.

We approach with caution, as if the nothing

     spilling from its mouth sounded

like noise, as if the sky draped behind it wasn’t

     the simple product of paint & perspective.

We are thoughtful. We are such good listeners.

     Today, we learned the names for all of its teeth.