A Poem by Billy Collins

The experience of visiting a museum is more than educational-- it can be quite personal and transformative. This poem by Billy Collins captures the unique, awe-inspiring and sometimes humbling experience of visiting a museum and submerging oneself complete in its great works of art.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art

I will now step over the soft velvet rope

and walk directly into this massive Hudson River

painting and pick my way along the Palisades

with a stick I snapped off a dead tree.

I will skirt the smoky, nestled towns

and seek the path that leads always outward

until I become lost, without hope

of ever finding the way back to the museum.

I will stand on the bluffs in nineteenth-century clothes,

a dwarf among rock, hills, and flowing water,

and I will fish from the banks in a straw hat

which will feel like a brush stroke on my head.

And I will hide in the green covers of forests

so no appreciator of Fredric Edwin Church,

leaning over the soft velvet rope,

will spot my tiny figure moving in the stillness

and cry out, pointing for the others to see,

and be thought mad and led away to a cell

where there is no vaulting landscape to explore,

none of this birdsong that halts me in my tracks,

and no wide curving of this river that draws

my steps toward the misty vanishing point.

copyright, Billy Collins, 1987