by Laurie Block
In Yiddish, n'shamah kvetcher, a girdle. Every night she's liberated like Europe after the war Sophie sighs, once for every hook and eye, for the troops of bruised flesh and for all uneasy breathers at loose in the free world. Her girdle at attention by the bed succumbs, inch by inch to the pillow where a feather moves against her upper lip. Look, she lives, my Baba dreams of horses' turds steaming like chimneys, dark factories and ruined cities along the refugee road. In Paris, Chagall faces east into the screaming colours of the night. He can't describe the hectic, rosy glow of false dawn. How can he fill the dying canvas with cool blue horses and lovestruck guitars while the one-eyed sirens wail through fugitive human smoke? How can he paint his passion while others dance in fire? The frontiers of history shift in her hands, possible and alive. As she bakes bread the dough becomes a map, Russia rising under her thumb. Sophie returns to her youth, the beauty, talking to Chagall every morning over the ghost of a good breakfast, their words hot as coffee before he zips to his canvas, dipping his brush first in her. He says it's good to hear your voice, so cold and broken in Canada that, for the life of her, she can't. This is her odyssey. Sophie takes a broom to the dust of the Great Depression and to children stealing apples. While half the world burns, she polishes the legs of her unplayed piano, with spit and rags she calls on her unborn, children of Chagall. So many, hiding under her apron, she sees herself feeding them like chickens, a butter yellow cloud scratching at her feet. How their singsong brings the sun to her. How she was once the swan that knew the secret of flight.