Stealing The Scream by Monica Youn

It was hardly a high-tech operation, stealing The Scream.

That we know for certain, and what was left behind--

a store-bought ladder, a broken window,

and fifty-one seconds of videotape, abstract as an overture.

And the rest? We don’t know. But we can envision

moonlight coming in through the broken window,

casting a bright shape over everything--the paintings,

the floor tiles, the velvet ropes: a single, sharp-edged pattern;

the figure’s fixed hysteria rendered suddenly ironic

by the fact of something happening; houses

clapping a thousand shingle hands to shocked cheeks

along the road from Oslo to Asgardstrand;

the guards rushing in--too late!--greeted only

by the gap-toothed smirk of the museum walls;

and dangling from the picture wire like a baited hook,

a postcard: “Thanks for the poor security.”

The policemen, lost as tourists, stand whispering

in the galleries: ". . .but what does it all mean?”

Someone has the answers, someone who, grasping the frame,

saw his sun-red face reflected in that familiar boiling sky.