Reza Baraheni Exile poem of the gallery In the Portrait of Apollinaire one eye of the poet is closed like Odin's, the double chin is lifted to one side of the face and the countenance is a moon blinded by its revolution Yet this is not what the Persian poet sees with both eyes Chagall has put Over Vitebsk between the three eyes of the two poets The year is 1914, when the 19th century ended and human flight began in Vitebsk. In Rodin's Adam, the absence of divine clay hurts the hands of prehistory It is black and heavy God moulding it in the Age of Iron, with no touch of irony Instead, you see the organic unity of Rilke's sonnet to Orpheus A pity that Orpheus is not there with Rodin Adam would have been replaced by Eurydice, the woman in ashes waving her soft hand, disappearing Rilke, the apprentice, too timid to suggest it to the master, had to go to the steppes of Pasternak's Russia and Chagall's Vitebsk. "Kiss my lips. She did."1 Whenever I see these words, I run, then I fly, not freely, that is for Chagall, but in a plane, to look down and see as Picasso did the canvas, and Gertrude suggested that we should see all his paintings as if looking down from a plane, since the "war was the composition of cubism." Picasso inherits the earth from the sky, dividing and blending frontiers And Blake had said: "To create a little flower is a labour of ages." This time, Eurydice descends from the sky to lay her face on the double-mooned face of the poet in the Gallery's Picasso "Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did."1 But I am not talking of this flight, and this 1914. First, I have to walk to the biggest hall to wake up my son sleeping under the legs of the draped female colossus, a Henry Moore "I have feathers/Gentle fishes."1 And Aba Gertrude is my mother's title in heaven Where I am watching a few Picassos in the Art Gallery of Ontario "In the midst of our happiness we were very pleased."1 He sleeps there, the childhood of a long-haired deity All around him children re-collapse and re-collect their turbulent games, with parents and instructors frenzied to educate them in the ways of stone and flesh My son's dream is an education Gallery objects wash him in ether He has half-open, half-kissed mouth, his mind gallery crowded with softwares of arcane material. And stone is a stone is a stone in Mr. Moore Here it is, copious, but not to be copied And the game goes on Herculean arms are needed to unhinge the stones, reclining on their elbows, knees and buttocks Only a god could give you a tour of these Moores in the Gallery, by lifting them all on the tips of his fingers and nursing them by his lips Male stones of stability cast in female figures of needless heaviness each poised, regular or irregular, like a sterile island of desire, thirsting for passions of hammering rain Round cavities, peopled by smooth half-shoulders and half-backs, and single-fingered fists of female nipples, left untouched after the first touch of their master mason Silent homes of human members, each in search of an antediluvian desert to live happily ever after with the rush of the sand and the push of the wind The gigantic magic of curved slabs rising musically to end in upturned faces And how hard to say: "I have feathers/Gentle fishes,"1 in this hall Carry them all into open air The zoo needs a breath of the forest. "I am waiting here...I'm tired of standing - Let us fly together"2 Chagall must have said these words watching the uplifted toes of 19th century ballerinas in the next hall "Ton visage écarlate ton biplan transformable en hydroplan."3 Apollinaire must have seen it in Au-dessus de la ville, lovers flying freely over the city in colours, the spine of the woman openly made pregnant by her own buttocks Two arms and only three elegant shoes But they are flying and who cares? I have also seen his La promenade, the horizontal beauty in the air. The lonely Chagall in the Art Gallery of Ontario has a date I have gone through valleys of bronze and marble, and all pastures of faces and lines and eyes and hips, and I have noticed this: the epitome of my empathy This: Over Vitebsk, 1914 The crisis reflected in flight of the doomed and the damned The borders, as always, are closed the wars are beginning, the pages of exile are opening before your very nose And Chagall places my hat on the old man's head, hands him the cane of Oedipus throws a beggar's sack on the man's bent shoulder And makes him walk in space, over the city of Vitebsk in Gogol's Overcoat. We have to change the faces and figures of all coins all the moneys And change all the flags There remain only three things: the epitomes of our empathy: the "Sketch for Over Vitebsk," 1914; "Study for Over Vitebsk" and Over Vitebsk, 1914. Three things in all three of them: the man in flight; the schizophrenic gulf under him; and the city split in half: the non-place of exile century No one has a country. And the lonely Chagall in the Gallery keeps the exiled poet focused, changing the figures, the notes and the flags and even languages And Chagall inherits the sky as country And the sky as language And the poet looms over the precipice with a dagger thrust in his throat with his tongue caught between his teeth performing the sacred duty of writing this very poem of exile. March-April, 1999, Toronto notes 1 Lines from the poetry of Gertrude Stein 2 From a poem by Marc Chagall 3 From a poem by Apollinaire on a painting by Chagall