Mishkan

after Marc Chagall

Lee Peterson

 

You came to kiss and ask me
to make you a world
I was already building.

Your neck bent around the corner of my face
— under my hand—so it quaked.
You: green, blue. And my dress
moving—grey folds, black and white.
These peonies I clasp.
Flowers meant for you, on your birthday.

So many hues I’ve hung in your house
above the red floor, wanting the walls to sing.
Wanting to shield us from plainness
—as if such a thing could settle here.

The cake sits uneaten and round
by the knife, by the open window—a pink plate,
a cup next to it. And us, leaning towards the frame,
floating up.

 

 

 

Lee Peterson’s first collection, Rooms and Fields, won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2004). “Mishkan” is from a series of poems entitled Into This World. Peterson teaches in the English and Women’s Studies Programs at Penn State Altoona. She lives in Central Pennsylvania with her husband and daughter.

 

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