In the Museum of Wishes, legend says, are things
that never were, every forgotten thing:
secrets left untold, love unspoken,
wishes too elusive to be real.

In the Museum of Wishes, are plans
never carried out, such is their beauty.
They rest in ghostly galleries,
in vast halls of wondering.
Exhibits, surrounded by silence,
galaxies without a single star.

There’s a map of the Museum of Wishes
drawn as a footnote to some drab town,
a dusty exhibit in the history of dreams.
It gets further away as you drive there;
people shrug, scratch their heads
and offer to help, gesturing vaguely towards the horizon:
“There must be some mistake,” they say.
“Certainly,
        there’s no museum here.”

In the Museum of wishes you may
touch things best forgotten,
unloved, unsaid, not there, in aisles and galleries as endless
as speculation. People say,
if there was no Museum of Wishes, thoughts
couldn’t stray on Earth. Untranslated
into life, they accumulate perversely,
forever refusing to be.

Reading signs in sighs or clouds,
walking backwards, looking where there is
clearly no museum,
you might find it, paradoxically. Enter cruel longing
at the edge of sleep,
find a child’s abandoned toy. Stumble,
just by chance, into the Museum of Wishes.

When you return, there’s barely a memory:
a wisp of nothing, useless as a tear.
Perhaps you cough, and change the subject:
“Yes the weather has been mild.
You drive towards the Museum of Wishes,
an image in your rear-view mirror, bright
like a star. Then something distracts:
the sound of breathing, or profiles
of clouds persuade false turns.
You leave the road, and speed away.

“There it is!” and someone tugs your sleeve,
some day you were almost absent to yourself.
“There! Beyond the lake”, pointing where an
old bus shelter
is scribbled by the rain. “There!” into shadows
and broken glass in a wrecker’s yard.
“There!”, then drops your sleeve and says,
“Why did you bring me here?”

At last, you stop and stretch, or yawn,
surveying yet another vacant lot.
You wander down a ruined subway, linger
on a bridge above a dreaming town. You
look down at rubble, at some anonymous city,
stroke your tired smile, adjust your frown.
You have arrived, and stand silent at last
on a patch of withered grass.