Model Trains

Chagall, Over the Town, 1918

Model Trains

Defeated in Vitebsk, 
slowly snaking his way to Moscow,

Chagall in a cattle car 
in 1920 
is already famous;
feared for his nerve in Petrograd,

written about in Paris,

bought in Berlin.
He is with Bella and Ida and hunger.

Germany can't quite feel '36,

nor Paris foldup its heart for '40.

But Russia contracts its fist.

Chagall in '22 will leave you.

While Babel rides alongside 
doomed Trunov doomed,
scribbling notes about horses,

tachankas, beastly cossacks 
and dead old Poles,

while Europe's degenerate corpse

feeds ravenous colonies,

a decade of cattlecar hunger

and cattlecar death awaits.

Some of Chagall's enemies 
will die in purge or siege 
in '38, '39, '43

-- as gripped in a calloused claw

Babel too will end and

fragile Mandelstam frozen.

Chagall, Homage, 1917

In 2015

in the rafters of the beige library

in Oakland California

Chagall hovers prostrate

in an undertaker's suit smiling,

plotting my escape while I watch,

terribly worried, secretly terrified

of my mood tomorrow,

wondering how long

the hungry pungent man

propped atop a chair beside me

will be reading aloud

from that book of model trains.

                                - J. O'Brien