When I Walk out of the Museum (feat. Julie Doiron)

When I walk out of the museum The wall of sudden light makes me crinkle up my nose And standing, coat half on, between marble columns I sneeze into the wind When I walk out of the museum I have centuries of dust behind my eyes I hunch a little bit From the culminated weight of all these other peoples' ideas I see a tipped over garbage can blowing in the street When I walk out of the museum I think about a snorkeler surfacing tangled in kelp That is me: writhing, wild attention, glancing around The huge museum doors behind me slam And I flinch In all of these brief flashes of momentary clarity The emptiness that cuts through is like A bowl beneath the sky Empty, not yet pregnant Fertile, without form It terrifies me, the raw possibility And I want to go back inside But when I walk out of the museum Everything I see seems rippling and alive On a freezing January day The museum And the garbage And the internet And the constellations All collapse into a heap And light floods out From this compost pile