When I met Amadeo Modigliani,
I knew of hunger
what did I know of love?
I was in Paris. On my honeymoon.
As my new husband met with other women
i met with Amadeo, an impoverished Italian Jew.
His paintings not yet famous.
We would walk Parisian streets
in the warm summer rain
and snuggle under his black umbrella
and recite by heart poems from Verlaine together.
He begged me, don’t go back to Russia.
Russia? I said, where is that? It’s Russiya.
Don’t go back to Russiya, Anna.
I did.
That winter he wrote me in Petrograd:
Vous êtes en moi comme une hantise;
You are obsessively part of me.
I knew it was true,
that he was more myself
than my own familiar hands.
Back in Petrograd,
I would touch my lips in the mirror
and say my own name
and believe my voice was his.
I think of Lot’s wife.
How they told her not to turn,
to not look at Sodom, her home
even as it was being destroyed
but how could she not
turn to the green fields where she had sung,
turn to the bed where her children
were made, turn to the place
of her blood?
When I turned back to Paris
because his love felt like home
even though i knew it would be destroyed,
I was not transformed into salt
but into chalk, black chalk, his chalk on paper.
I did not know then
how that I would come
to treasure his vision,
how I would tape his drawing
on the wall in every house
i ever lived in so I could live again
between those lines in a time
of wild honey, scent of beeswax candles,
his amber eyes.
Amedeo always drew me naked
in long spare lines—
Always from memory when he was alone.
With me, his hands
were too busy for chalk.
He’d slip off my dress,
and in my breast,
he’d visit my beloved Russian steppes,
in my waist, he buried himself
in Siberian snow,
and between my thighs,
he was baptized again and again
in the floodwaters of the Neva River.
They’d not yet made
a corset that will fit me—
how could it when I
am all of Russia?
Oh I loved him. Wrote him poems.
Left red roses strewn on his studio floor.
How airy the light was then.
How I loved being what they would later call me,
polovina monakhini, half nun,
polovina shlyukha, half whore.