The Minimalist Museum by Edward Hirsch
I am driving past our house on Sul Ross
across the street from the minimalist museum.
I am looking up at the second-story window
where I gazed down at the curators
carrying their leather satchels to work
and the schoolchildren gathering on the front lawn.
I spent my forties at that window, stirring milk
into my coffee and brooding about the past,
listening to Satie’s experiments and Cage’s
dicey music wafting over the temple of modernism.
I chanced a decade at that window, imperious
to the precarious moment, the broken moon-
light flooding over the neighborhood trees,
my wife’s moody insomnia, my son’s fitful sleep,
and sacrificing another five years, another ten years,
to the minor triumphs, the major failures.
