Painting for the following poem: http://www.famousartistsgallery.com/gallery/chagall-tb.html


The Zenith and Nadir of Chagall’s Birthday, 1915

Your neck, an illegal U-turn.
You sin,
letting your arms
stretch toward your hovering
savior in the sky.

You wonder why God does
not reach down to touch
the great nadir, does not lean
forward to pick up his child,
floating with salvation.

Sinful lips, tripped on the stump
of morality—morality pulled
from a childhood
pew,
like constellations
drawn on a Methodist bulletin.

Give me my sin again.

I fall toward the window,
toward freedom like
a limp soldier, Normandy,
freedom
being quite free.

The window, an opening
from my cage, I yearn
to collapse into the streets,
to fly from this pasture into
the bottom of another cage—
leave you ascending to empyrean
like carbonation.

I deliver flowers of mourning
to the floor of my new cage.
Falling into the asphalt
like Troy,
I place Athena’s
bouquet watered
with guilt
on the street,
the Great Grave of Ecology,

the Grave of God,
they wither.