Stealing The Scream Poem 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.