Chagall Taught Me How to Drive

Through the Chevy rumble of a borrowed car,
we waited for her baby to be born,
our nights sliding under the tires like a Chagall
painting of the wedding couple floating above town.
The beautiful breasts of my girlfriend
like frosting on a wedding cake. She steered me
blindly across the road with one hand,
avoiding a levitating fiddler, Chagall himself
standing on the side of the road, showing us
he had seven fingers to paint faster.
My girlfriend was pregnant and she taught me
how to drive, her cheekbones pressed against my shoulder.
When I strayed out of my lane, she said to keep left,
pretending the faded white line was a child.
I hadn’t fathered the road or the baby inside her.
Nor would we ever float loose above wooden fences,
pass through a window into Paris.
She didn’t want to birth her baby alone:
her belly barely fit behind the steering wheel.
I drove thirty miles per hour, slowing down
for peasants who were dancing in the road,
thinking they must be from Belarus, where
Chagall first painted on stained glass:
these ghosts from his past now stared at us.
We were headed for the beach in our borrowed Chevy.
The trees waited for us to find them human,
as they stood one after another, with their arms raised.
I counted them along the road until one bent in heartache,
and this was where we turned off for the shore.

Russell Thorburn is the author of four books of poems. Somewhere We’ll Leave the World, published by Wayne State University Press, draws on the poet’s own experiences while imagining fictional characters and personal heroes. In a previous book, Misfit Hearts, he chronicles the making of The Misfits through the filming-location photographs of Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. In Let It Be Told in a Single Breath, his latest book published by Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, he picks up where he left off with recurring characters and a younger self in dislocations of time and space. He has received numerous grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. The Upper Peninsula’s first poet laureate, Thorburn teaches composition at Northern Michigan University.