From Volume 37: A poem by Leone Scanlon

MY SEVENTY-SIXTH YEAR
By Leone Scanlon

In Chagall’s kitchen a red floor, a cake, and a cut melon on a red table,
pink roses for her birthday, her feet not quite touching the floor,
he, floating above and around, head curved like a swan’s for a kiss,
like the father in cummings’ poem swaying “deep like a rose”
over his mother to kiss, like a poet, as I imagined he would and did
when I was young, life transformed, the way Chagall
turned a kitchen with cake, knife, red floor into flying,
the way pain slices flesh and spirit crimson,
the way cut roses spill petals over a table filling the room,
the way the on-sale rose bush my daughter planted
blooms again and again even in late October, scenting the chill
as I descend the steps in slippers and robe to pick up the paper,
sky still starred, pink changing to blue, crows cawing from a tree-top
and turn, gathering my robe, breathing in roses, to start the day.