Souvenir | Looking for Modigliani | Communion | Pears, Jeanne
Souvenir | Back to top
A winter’s night, and the whole
icebound garden sparkles
and crackles. I wonder
if she thinks about me at all, though I know
there is no path back. Memory
whispers in my ear, and the horse chestnuts
lean close to listen.
Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu?
—chanting Verlaine
on those end of summer afternoons,
we walked through these same gardens,
then sat close together,
my old, black umbrella between us
as the rain fell, and a mist
rose in the soft heat
so that the last flowers glowed.
My lips brushed her cheek.
“I want my work to fly.”
She replied, “I admire you
because you are not like the others,
the cubists who reduce a human being
to geometry.”
Our bodies were drenched, our minds
for the moment alike—and yet
seven years have passed since she last wrote
from Tsarskoye Selo
of the sharp cries of the migrating
cranes, sunset on dark firs,
and the yellow circle
her lamp cast on the blue writing paper
as she sat gazing
at the hoarfrost on the glass,
her thoughts of me
not as I am now,
but as I most desire to remember
myself, bathed in golden light:
noble, courteous, speaking
only of art.
In one of those blue letters
she spoke of me “enclosed in a ring
of solitude”: that lambent circle
I must still try to live within.
She lives there, too.
“Why we communicate”:
her words, spoken that first time
I slipped the thin chemise
from her shoulders. Souvenir,
souvenir, que me veux-tu?
Or later, coming home
to find a dozen roses arrayed
on the bed. When we met outside
her hotel, I asked, “How
did you get in? The studio door was locked.”
And she smiled
in such an idle way
as to forever seal
her affinity with the Egyptian queens,
and said, “I didn’t.
I tossed the roses through the window
one by one.”
Looking for Modigliani | Back to top
Hard to find you along the staccato cliffs
of Capri, though you and Eugenia wintered here,
plucking sapphires from a capricious sea,
tossing them high into the vault of sky
where they became cacti, stars, whirlpools.
Still dizzy with Wilde’s vision of artist
lit by the Gioconda’s smile, you
traveled next to Rome. Here, too,
I search in vain for your long echoes,
though as you would, I scorn the tourist
eye of the video camera, running
from one masterpiece
to another, invading the silences.
What they could never understand:
the jewel of Rome lay not without
but within. Her feverish sweetness,
her tragic countryside, all these are mine.
Confident of bodying forth
the blue depths, you forsook
the ruby-throated Mediterranean
for a foreign city and a strange language.
‘O Paris, Gare centrale debarcadere
des volontes carrefour des inquietudes’:
where a mattress-maker stacked
paintings by the dozen, and nearby
at the Café Rotonde, artists,
circus performers, and revolutionaries
drank, dreamt, and argued.
So you joined them,
dressed in a suit of velvet, a silk scarf fanning
the air. Here, you made thumb sketches
like arabesques, searching for a language
capable of expressing what
you already knew. Je suis triste.
Understanding, you smile back.
Communion | Back to top
All day long, today and forever, she stands
before us, a servant girl in a black dress, lovely
stem of throat framed by white ‘v’ of collar.
Her name, Marie Feret, peasant girl
come from Cagnes-sur-Mer to Paris,
seeking work as a ladies’ maid. Framed
within the mottled, robin’s egg blue of corner,
head bowed like a tulip in wind, she
echoes the stance of one of Raphael’s angels—
Ninety years gone by, and still we can read
her story in the heavy shoes so at odds
with the high forehead, the apricot warmth of face.
What has the blue vacancy of Marie already seen?
What does she have to look forward to?
And yet, in the dove’s clasp of hand over hand,
Modigliani has infused her with a vision:
that angels in the stone cathedral
are listening, that silences can fly.
Pears, Jeanne | Back to top
You try to share his absorption
in solemn Madonnas, the iconic stillness
of their bowed heads, but get stuck
on sorrow’s inevitable habit
of finding your face. You say
nothing, allow a look of reproach
to become contemplation or absence.
Wondering what his Italy was like,
you picture a boy who breathed with difficulty
crying out during the night;
lack of breath, the only explanation
for the purple shades
you, too, are learning to exist
within. Still, you’re curious
to know the shape and feel of a land
that gave birth to bellezza, alba, tramonto—
Such questions, not the result of too much
time, not with a child to feed and bathe, constant
worries about how to pay for fuel
and whether to buy fresh butter,
or a small loaf of semolina; but then
Modi would have to do without
alizarin crimson and a white pure as
the eggs glistening in the grocer’s case.
You’ve forsaken your own designs on painting,
though some nights you slip out of bed,
the whiteness of your chemise
like clean canvas.
Today, you set four gold-green pears on a plate,
then touch each one as you pass—
within your fingertips, the full weight of ripeness.