The Creation of Man
after Chagall

In Chagall’s painting of the angel

ferrying the fallen skyward

the sun is a whirl-i-gig and behind the moon

a god reads to human choirs

a story of peace

from the yellow canvas of conviction.

Amongst the bric-a-brac (peacock, donkey, flying fish

the priest’s ladder, his teetering menorah)

the artist’s signature–two lovers drowning

in Carpathians of blue, the embryonic whisper

of an infant child held up, a looking glass between them.

In this corner of the frame

the damages of history

blanketed in palimpsest.

Silence restores the carnival of dreams.

This is the pool of silence, it has no shores.

Its tributaries run inward, cthontic and cold.

We live on the height of the city,

no longer believe in ghouls. At table

your hands build temples inside coffee smoke.

Rage nests in my lap, it has a silver beak

and the wolf made of bone, convoluted pendant

on a leather thong, leaps.

Tezca, south-of-the-border man, offers a teakwood box,

spills out its contents, fifty-two numbered pieces.

I follow him downstairs, to the galley, where the kitchens are.

You keep your place by the window, snow insulating

the double panes. There is something to be said but

it is nothing he doesn’t already know.

Margins spancelled, their ivory hinterlands decked out

in meticulous etymologies

Kitchens dusted with the scrawl of insects,

codices of wing-cut cuneiform

And under the floorboards the moon chattering

in a foreign tongue

Send me screaming back to his hooded mountains,

that legion of ravens

The blackest one helmeted in snow, tongue a cutlass,

heart a nest of tindersticks.

On the first day of a new year

the fields are linen filched

by the yard from absent weavers.

No one will observe the ceremony

of my unbound feet making their way

north to the trap door of his singing well.