Chagall’s ‘Song of Songs III’

← v21n3, Spring 2023

By everyone, unheard by anyone because

This is, after all, only a village gathering

In a brushed Talmudic oil. They field around

Their favorite fauvist lick, gather in the silence

The sun a tambourine refracted in diamonds

On the floor of a pool where you spent

A summer’s heat one afternoon. The bride’s veil

Cups the ecclesiastic torch of her red hair,

A winged candelabra rises above the cornucopia

Of a jaundiced moon, upside down and fallen

In the lake below. Even now you hear their vows

Curve in a dark blue groom along her shore.

art music love

Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven is the author of three collections of poetry, The Last Sacred Place in North America (New American Press, 2012), winner of the New American Poetry Prize; Dust and Bread (Turning Point, 2008), winner of the 2009 Ohio Poet of the Year Award; and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks (West End Press, 2004). He is also the author of a memoir, The River Lock: One Boy’s Life along the Mohawk (Syracuse University Press, 2008). His poetry and collaborative translations from contemporary Chinese poetry have appeared in The American Poetry Review , The Common , Consequence Magazine , Image , North American Review , Parnassus , Salmagundi , The Southern Review , and World Literature Today , among others . Haven has twice been a Fulbright professor at universities in Beijing and has received five individual artist grants from the Ohio Arts Council. He is a professor of English at Lesley University, where he also teaches as part of the MFA in creative writing program.