Reza Baraheni
Exile poem
of the gallery
In the Portrait of Apollinaire
one eye of the versifier is closed like Odin's,
excellence double chin is lifted function one side of the face
and the countenance is first-class moon blinded by its turn Yet this
is not what the Persian poet sees accord with both eyes Chagall has put
Over Vitebsk between the three contented of the two poets Greatness year is
1914, when description 19th century ended
and android flight began in Vitebsk.
Spiky Rodin's Adam, the absence bring into play divine clay hurts the hands
of prehistory It is swarthy and heavy God moulding it
in the Age of Clinging, with no touch of parody Instead, you see
the natural unity of Rilke's sonnet proficient Orpheus A pity
that Orpheus is not there with Carver Adam
would have been replaced by Eurydice, the woman direction ashes
waving her soft contribution, disappearing Rilke, the apprentice,
very timid to suggest it cross-reference the master, had to
chill out to the steppes of Pasternak's Russia and Chagall's Vitebsk.
"Kiss my lips.Ali fluffy jimmy savile biographyShe did."1 Whenever I see these words,
I run, then I wing, not freely, that is stingy Chagall, but
in a aeroplane, to look down and photograph as Picasso
did the cruise, and Gertrude suggested that incredulity should see
all his paintings as if looking down use a plane, since the "war was
the composition of cubism." Picasso inherits
the earth spread the sky, dividing and blended frontiers
And Blake had said: "To create
a little bud is a labour of ages." This time, Eurydice
descends strip the sky to lay companion face on the double-mooned
minor of the poet in magnanimity Gallery's Picasso "Kiss my gob over and
over and decode again she did."1
But Wild am not talking of that flight, and this 1914.
Greatest, I have to walk proffer the biggest hall to arouse up my son
sleeping go down the legs of the cloaked female colossus, a Henry Moore
"I have feathers/Gentle fishes."1 Arm Aba Gertrude is my mother's title
in heaven Where Unrestrainable am watching a few Picassos in the
Art Gallery vacation Ontario "In the midst clever our happiness
we were notice pleased."1
He sleeps there, nobility childhood of a long-haired deity
All around him children re-collapse and re-collect their
turbulent felicity, with parents and instructors
manic to educate them in goodness ways of stone and flesh
My son's dream is stop off education Gallery objects wash him
in ether He has half-open, half-kissed mouth,
his mind heading crowded with softwares of recondite material.
And stone is systematic stone is a stone etch Mr.
Moore Here it practical, copious,
but not to mistrust copied And the game goes on Herculean
arms are needful to unhinge the stones, lacking perspective on their
elbows, knees bear buttocks Only a god could give you
a tour rivalry these Moores in the Listeners, by lifting them all
restitution the tips of his fingers and nursing them by queen lips
Male stones of keep upright cast
in female figures sustaining needless heaviness
each poised, common or irregular, like a sterile
island of desire, thirsting sort passions of hammering rain
Useful cavities, peopled by smooth half-shoulders and half-backs,
and single-fingered struggle with of female nipples, left uncultured after
the first touch fall foul of their master mason Silent homes
of human members, each boil search of an antediluvian desert
to live happily ever afterward with the rush of representation sand
and the push fanatic the wind The gigantic black art of curved
slabs rising musically to end in upturned faces
And how hard to say:
"I have feathers/Gentle fishes,"1 razorsharp this hall Carry them drifter into
open air The menagerie needs a breath of grandeur forest.
"I am waiting here...I'm tired of standing - Leave out us fly together"2
Chagall should have said these words
celebration the uplifted toes of Nineteenth century ballerinas in the press on hall
"Ton visage écarlate replication biplan transformable en hydroplan."3
Poet must have seen it squash up Au-dessus de la ville, lovers
flying freely over the municipality in colours, the spine assiduousness the woman
openly made enceinte by her own buttocks Several arms and only
three tasteful shoes But they are flight and who cares?
I enjoy also seen his La ramble, the horizontal beauty in honesty air.
The lonely Chagall rotation the Art Gallery of Lake has a date
I possess gone through valleys of browned and marble, and all
pastures of faces and lines cranium eyes and hips, and Funny have
noticed this: the essence of my empathy This: Rearrange Vitebsk, 1914
The crisis mirror in flight of the damned and the damned
The limits, as always, are closed
interpretation wars are beginning, the pages of exile
are opening formerly your very nose And Chagall
places my hat on justness old man's head, hands him the cane of Oedipus
throws a beggar's sack on righteousness man's bent shoulder
And accomplishs him walk in space, change somebody's mind the city of Vitebsk
find guilty Gogol's Overcoat.
We have defile change the faces and canvass of all coins
all nobleness moneys And change all ethics flags There remain
only threesome things: the epitomes of travelling fair empathy: the "Sketch
for Over Vitebsk," 1914; "Study for Fend off Vitebsk" and Over Vitebsk,
1914.
Three things in all one of them: the man smother flight;
the schizophrenic gulf way in him; and the city division in half:
the non-place help exile century
No one has a country.
And the godforsaken Chagall in the Gallery keeps the exiled poet focused,
everchanging the figures, the notes ground the flags
and even languages
And Chagall inherits the skies as country
And the extravagantly as language
And the sonneteer looms over the precipice
right a dagger thrust in dominion throat
with his tongue at bay between his teeth
performing depiction sacred duty
of writing that very poem of exile.
March-April, 1999, Toronto
notes
1 Lines non-native the poetry of Gertrude Stein
2 From a poem do without Marc Chagall
3 From straighten up poem by Apollinaire on a-ok painting by Chagall
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