| "Chagall Painted My Heart" Salvatore Amico M. Buttaci sambpoet@ibm.net Chagall painted my heart once, insisting he was good at it, had done so many hearts posterity would remember always his flaming pinks and reds, happy sun-gold splashes, ribbons of cerulean-blue skies wrapping in neat place a floating cloud heart you would swear was beating. "I paint hearts," Chagall said, "Birds, too, that seem to fly over housetops with chimneys puffing grey smoke." But when he prepared the pallette, squeezed tubes of color paste onto the wood, toned down the stark white canvas with a grainy bland undercoat, he reminded me his forte was abstraction: "I could recreate your heart, pump life into it, shape it, command the colors to reveal it, precisely and abstractly." "My heart would become Chagall's heart," I tell the painter (as if he weren't there) "My heart would do cloud things and bird things. It would burn to embers in small houses. It would climb like wayward grey smoke. Cinders of magenta and forest-green would highlight what cannot beat there. And my heart would burn away in the aura of your sunlight." But Marc Chagall would not be distracted. Against the blue-grey backdrop he worked his brush magic, stroking like a patient lover, his eyes transfixed, unblinking. Then finally: "It's done," he said, then waved a painter's cramped hand over his abstraction. "Your heart! Your heart!" he said. But I can see only that the small house in the woods is empty. Dabs of far-away birds pebble a smooth dull sky. Half a red rowboat noses its keel down into desolate shoreline, and somewhere an abstract wind blows erect the golden wisps of splintering wood. "'Your Heart'" says Chagall. "I will call this 'Your Heart.'" Brain Candy E-Zine has no rights to this story. The rights belong to the author. |
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