Mount Eerie, Julie Doiron - When I Walk Out of the Museum lyrics

When I walk out of the museum
The wall of sudden light
Makes me crinkle up my nose
And standing, coat half on
Between marble columns
I sneeze into the wind

When I walk out of the museum
I have centuries of dust behind my eyes
I hunch a little bit
From the culminated weight of all
These other peoples' ideas
I see a tipped over garbage
Can blowing in the street

When I walk out of the museum
I think about a snorkeler
Surfacing tangled in kelp
That is me: writhing, wild attention
Glancing around
The huge museum doors behind me slam
And I flinch

In all of these brief
Flashes of momentary clarity
The emptiness that cuts through is like
A bowl beneath the sky
Empty, not yet pregnant
Fertile, without form
It terrifies me, the raw possibility
And I want to go back inside
But when I walk out of the museum
Everything I see seems rippling and alive
On a freezing January day everything:
The museum and the garbage
And the internet and the constellations
All collapse into a heap
And light floods out from this compost pile