The Future Museum: The Sleepers

The Future Museum: The Sleepers

The Future Museum: The Sleepers

In this display the artist
has wrapped life-cast figures in a hand-
made net of fishing wire—Figures
painted with a one-hair brush and true
even to the number of their eyelashes, the blind
sheen of their nails—so much like life
they bring home the strangeness of things
being motionless.
                        Only the net,
its each thread soaked in camphor solution,
grows counterfeit ice, first as if by fraying,
by threads so fine as to be speculative—
each thread the colour of a needle-scratch
in glass—and they divide from each division
till like regret, which feeds on hunger, they
close in the effigies—
                        as if they would prove
by what trick of longing the blankest fact is
closed in dreams the way a new-hatched bird’s
bluish flesh-clot pricks with feathers, each exact
as fossil etchings, and it is the blood-fist free
in its device—Some force there is will be consoled,
will make these votives of a stranger’s loss.
Of any stranger’s loss.