It was

early morning, the red shutters
not yet flung open, everyone else 
in Vitebsk still asleep (except for someone 
relieving himself by the fence). A goat grazes
in the yard between the stable and the house.
Mist and fog cloak everything with the quiet 
of not-moving. If there's any ripening and harvest
in orchards and fields, this isn't in the picture.  
Neither is the war looming over Europe 
and the rest of the world.  But you and your wife 
rise into the powdery sky like something of joy 
that's escaped containment.  Like the landscape 
soon folding inward into cubes shows you a dimension 
it wants you to remember above everything else. 

~ after Marc Chagall