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Blue Violinist
- Southern Illinois University Press
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22 BlueViolinist Marc Chagall, 1946 We have come home from the cold, even children— they float up the street in bluing light, smoke from dinner fires. All the chickens cooped and roosted. The pigeon seller in his ramshackle rooms, the baker’s cottage with lantern windows, a whiff of warm bread at the panes. In my painting the sky is winter descending, the clouds an open field for snow rills, a moon’s bald intrusion, fiddle’s keen and glister over our roofs. I stipple in a little heat: red the hue of still-smoldering coals. Whole villages abandoned, or swallowed by surprise of flame, violent and complete. First, airplane engine no louder than the mosquito’s whine. After, stone wall, lone chimney, smoke. I don’t think of this every day. Newspaper clippings, violin solo unspooling from the wireless, or the earthy fumes of woodstoves lifting on a cold morning double me over in grief. Somewhere under this sky I paint, I’m a child. Father bathes first, and the water glitters with mackerel scales that swirl like galaxies or oil sliding over the surface of soup. His beard steams as he dries himself, while I undress, shivering in my skin. 23 I lower into the basin and listen— the rustle of cigarette papers, father just through the curtain. He dusts tobacco down the center of the paper, curling each slip: a tube, little wider than the wisher’s bone. The oil lamp casts a tent of light for his hands, as if the raft of cigarettes, the knotty wood, his articulate fingers, comprise the world. Overhead, frozen bedsheets steam and soften, uncontorting. Scent of lye and wind. ...