Myron’s Wall of Wonder

Everyday he walked the beach; returned with pockets full of God-knows-what.
When tides were low after a nor’easter, he could fill his station wagon
with sandblasted curiosities from Neptune’s cabinet—
all of which wound up on Myron’s "Wall of Wonder."

But not right off—not till he’d pondered each bit’s provenance,
and function, composition, formal attributes and elemental qualities,
and, through a process known to him alone, made it a part of
this odd, epic theater we knew as Myron’s "Wall of Wonder."
"I don’t know what it is," he’d say, "But don’t it just look like a so and so."
Fish bones are a menorah, piston rings a room divider,
handlebars bull’s horns—astute for one who didn’t know
Duchamp from Dr. Suess. A stick of wood became a frog-a-lion,
plastic combs an army on the march across a grid
of wooden crates that once held broccoli
and peaches, krupuk udang, Tampax.
Louise Nevelson would sure have been intrigued
by all the spools and tools and rods and reels
which pushed the boxes into poetry—the rings
of garden hose and linkages, the current markers, colored glass
and toidyettes: a three-ring circus played out on a bird’s-eye view
of Lizard Lick, Nevada, and it made us laugh—it did!

Brain lesions stopped the evolution of the Wall, at last.
When Myron died, my Mother photographed it all,
and packed it carefully in boxes, swore
She’d set it up again, but that was many years ago.

And anyway, you had to be there—had to feel the electricity, the thunder,
had to laugh with that strange ringmaster at Myron’s "Wall of Wonder."

Andrew Periale
June, 2005

Photo courtesy of the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program 2008