Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Charles Harper Webb’s "Over the Town" channels the dreamlike levity of Marc Chagall’s paintings into a meditation on love’s ephemeral magic and the cruel inevitability of loss. The poem moves between personal recollection, artistic interpretation, and philosophical musing, binding together past and present, art and memory, desire and mortality. Like Chagall’s Birthday and Over the Town, Webb’s poem presents love as a force that momentarily defies physical and temporal limitations, only to be betrayed by time’s relentless march forward.

The poem begins with Chagall and his wife, Bella, floating above Vitebsk, their Russian hometown, an image taken from Over the Town. Webb’s fascination with their weightless embrace mirrors his own memory of carrying his first girlfriend, Connie, in the cross-chest carry while practicing lifesaving techniques at fifteen. This physical act, meant for emergencies, is transformed into something intimate, a gesture of security and devotion. Yet, just as Chagall’s fantastical depiction of love exists outside of realism, so too does young love defy permanence. The poet recalls how Connie dumped him for a senior, a mundane heartbreak that contrasts with the soaring, boundless love suggested in the painting. Even so, he treasures that fleeting time, understanding that moments of happiness, though brief, exist in their own kind of timelessness.

Webb explores Chagall’s Birthday, another painting of the artist and Bella, in which Chagall twists himself into an impossible position to kiss his wife. The absurd contortion reflects the all-consuming nature of love, the way it rearranges logic and space. The poet connects this image to his own life, evoking the sensation of being so enraptured by love that one feels untethered from physical laws. However, the dreamlike euphoria is undercut by tragedy: Bella died unexpectedly in 1944, turning love’s timeless present into a mourned past. Webb’s use of unexpectedly—a term he lifts from a museum placard—exposes the absurdity of assuming love can exist outside of time. Love, for all its seeming permanence, is subject to rupture.

Webb then pivots to the realization that today, too, will one day belong to the past. Even in the midst of an embrace, even while holding onto his beloved, the knowledge of time’s passage lingers. This awareness doesn’t lessen the intensity of the moment, but it adds a layer of desperation—an urgent need to preserve what is fleeting. He swears he won’t let his present experiences dissolve into the abstraction of when I was a boy, but the very act of writing the poem signals that he already has. Memory, like art, is an attempt to capture what is gone.

The poem concludes with an act of defiance against impermanence. Standing in the very room where an artist named Gerbil once vomited cherry Jell-O in protest of art’s sterility—a scene of absurd rebellion—Webb finds his beloved in the crowd. In a final, deliberate act, he approaches her, smooths her hair, and recreates Chagall’s floating embrace, at least mentally. His feet remain stuck like magnets to the floor, reinforcing his mortality, his inability to truly transcend time and space. Yet, in this imagined moment, he lifts her as if they could float forever high over L.A., attempting to suspend them both in the golden light of the present. The final line—as if I, mortal myself, could save your life—acknowledges the futility of trying to preserve love against time, but also the beauty in trying.

Webb’s "Over the Town" is a deeply layered exploration of love’s impermanence and art’s capacity to both capture and distort memory. Through Chagall’s paintings, Webb finds a metaphor for the way love elevates and isolates us, making us feel untethered from reality while also grounding us in the knowledge of its inevitable loss. Love, like art, attempts to preserve fleeting joy, but ultimately, it cannot prevent the past from forming. Yet, in moments of passion, in memory, in poetry, love continues to hover just above the earth—weightless, untouchable, and briefly eternal.

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