La Mariée
by Maisie Bilston
After Chagall
Do you remember the old scenes? This is how
it used to be. The curtains opened and were drawn again
over the poster on the wall, which we used to love:
the woman in the red dress, offered as though
she held the sky up on her small shoulders, and the goat
with the lion’s green eyes, glaring with a ferocity that was
outside of himself and terrible to him. Outside it is
another indigo hour, another short New England twilight;
all things come to quick ends as the gulls dip
like kites across the sky. The shadows of the last
leaves shudder and are gone. It’s happened like this
before, just in this way, this general drifting to earth.
Do you remember, love, that once, we left this place
and found a sleep that filled the shape of your dark room,
and animals like constellations paraded through the mind?
There the chickadee sang to us with his neat black cap,
there the bull with his crown of horns, and there the goat
with those eyes, they seemed to us then a black majesty of stars.
Now there’s only the long waking, the way the elderly wake
and do crosswords in bed, as the light climbs over
the treetops. High nest of a bird of prey, Melville’s errant captain,
clues pointing towards some final rearrangement
of the world, full of strange conjunctions. Aerie, Ahab,
unintelligible order; but to me, half-sleeping,
as beautiful and clear as the goat with the gold guitar.