To the Nines
To the Nines
Laurie Klein
St. Stephan’s Cathedral, Mainz, Germany
Glass is a transparent wall between
my heart and the heart of the world. —Marc Chagall
1
Breath is the first temple
we enter, crying.
Unclothed as woe.
2
1950s: the unholy strafe
and shatter war bequeaths—
my stripling dad fighting
the Reich; your uncle Karl
interred with his medals.
The festering shrapnel.
Rubble. All the denuded,
blown-out houses of God.
3
1970s: Let contrition
tearfully birth
invitation. Father Mayer,
thank you for pursuing
Monsieur Chagall
via letters, untallied prayers,
years of coaxing...
4
BUT those Nazi bonfires—
Chagall’s mystical
paintings torched, then,
after he’d fled, his people,
lost in the ashes.
5
[Still] WANTED: nine vast
memorial windows. Please,
will one painstaking son
of Abraham conceive, then
direct their execution?
Reading this now,
do you find yourself
hoping...
Marc Chagall, at 91,
paces the battered nave
beneath its vaulted roof
like the inverted keel
of an ark. Let there be
stars! Wings. Flames. Soaring
indigo exhalations. Brazen
blues will be his palette,
for war and Torah,
Eden and Abraham’s Isaac.
Madonna. Messiah.
Beauty, heaping
live coals over its foes.
6
1980s: All his ghosts
parade, and a tool slips,
gashing his thumb.
Does he yearn after
Bella, his wife and muse?
Shade an angelic wing
with one red smear?
O, human mosaic of pains.
7
Soon hope re-attires
the towering vacancies
in 18 shades of blue, lanced
with scarlet. Nine psalms
rise to the glassy pulse
of a lost generation.
8
2020s: We are dwarfed
now, beneath a refracted
coherence. It stains
the leaden frames,
my brow, your temples,
streaked with green,
other breasts and backs
imprinted with yellow,
each onlooker’s body
cellophaned
by the sacred and stark.
9
Woe, you are no longer
starless. You are
the crucible’s naked
dream of translucence:
nine acts of forgiveness,
enshrining light.
Laurie Klein
Poet & Author
Laurie has been published in The Southern Review, New Letters, Saint Katherine Review, Plough, Solum, Every Day Poems, and other journals and anthologies and is the author of Where the Sky Opens, and Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh.
Photography by Reginald Van de Velde