Midnight in the Museum

Midnight in the museum

In the yawning resonance

Of empty space

The great xylophone skeletons

Play the lonely strains of Time

Like cathedral organs

Heralding the ends of ages.

Time rushes on

The final predator

Implacable

Like Dinichthys

Cruising the crinoid beds

Sounding one note:

Everything dies.

Change hammers all

On the anvil of eons

Carnivores and civilizations

Long of tooth

Weak of spirit

Wracked by rot and riot

Collapse.

Their carcasses play host

To new generations

That strip the drying flesh

And flaunt their youth

Beneath the philistine stars

That warmed the nebulae

Before the phoenix-fusion birth

Of brash young Sol.

I feel a distant call

The silent whistle screaming

Of my genes

Seeking always

To jump this fragile ship of life

And flee down the generations

Until I am lost

Expended

Forgotten.

The tyrant kings smile knowingly:

“You too shall pass”

And continue their stately voyage

Into eternity.

The circle closes

The revolution complete

And morning spreads her wings

To the far horizon.

I do not fear the dawn

Or the age to come

For I have basked

On desert sands

Drinking life like heat

And felt the mighty Tethys

Washing over my feet.

Notes

In 1998-2001 I was a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, with night-owl tendencies and all-hours keycard access to the old museum collections, a defunct WWII-era gymnasium where dinosaur skeletons were prepared and test-assembled, and the new building — now the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History — where they were being installed, ancient bones going up on skeletons of new steel. I wrote this in 1998 or 1999; perhaps fittingly, its precise origin is now lost in time. I’d no doubt say it all rather differently now, but 50-year-old me will yield the floor to the 20-something who penned this, not least because he wrote me into existence as well. Oh, and if I didn’t swipe the expression “xylophone skeletons” directly from Ray Bradbury’s Dinosaur Tales, it was at least heavily inspired by Bradbury.

Photos, top to bottom:

Diplodocus, Utah Field House of Natural History, Vernal, UT

Pteranodon, Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center, Woodland Park, CO

Something toothy, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, NY

Clouds over Mygatt-Moore Quarry, Rabbit Valley, CO

Ripple rock, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver, CO

Source: https://svpow.com/2025/09/27/midnight-in-the-museum/