Harry Houdini Exhibit at the Jewish Museum

Your things are on display like an open casket.

Needles on a string you pulled from your mouth.
The awed, rusty faces of locks.
The milk can, the Chinese water torture cell,
manacles, keys.
Photographs of you
underwater, the four minute show,
nothing but lungs, bones. Chest, waist—
concave stomach. You smirk: what can you do?
How long can you hold your breath?

Fragile skin of journal pages—
the letters slant like a man upside down.
How you stood on East 79th Street,
remembered your father’s voice, wept—
you were ashamed to tell your wife.
There are buildings you can’t leap from.

And here,
silk shorts you wore only
a minute on Coney Island
till you stood
naked near the water’s break,
the crowd almost angry.
Let us see a man drown.

You cut through the water like
perfect praying hands.