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Myra Schneider

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In the Chagall Museum

Why is she sitting so small and tightly closed?
Nine at most, her stillness compels, wrests
attention from Jacob on the ladder wrestling with dream.

Curled over the sheaf of white papers on her lap,
mice fingers on row after row of raised dots,
she's marooned in this temple dedicated to sight.

Is she reading about Jacob's braced mauve back,
the silver lick illuminating his knee muscles? Is mauve
to her the honeyed scent of buddleia, taste of brambles?

Angels billow, midnight blues and sensual reds
leap from the walls but don't erase her fluent fingers,
the sticky soreness of her half-shut eyes.

Now she's being guided towards Adam and Eve,
Chagall lovers at ease among lighthearted bouquets
and woolly animals. She's placed at a hand's width

from the wolf, must be looking at its plum pelt
with peripheral vision. Can she see the crouched lion,
the green prancing in the garden? Abruptly she turns away.

Nearby the guilty pair run from the garden of paradise
to a world of wrongs. Below them at exactly her height
a purple fish is plunging, flippers spread like wings.

 

Myra Schneider is a tutor at The Poetry School in London.  Her most recent collections are Insisting on Yellow (Enitharmon 2000) and Parents: an Anthology by Women Writers (Enitharmon 2000) co-edited with Dilys Wood.

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