Something makes us turn—
though they tell us, go straight.
Though they tell us, look ahead,
something in us knows there’s another path.
And it’s ours.
When I met Modigliani,
what did I know of love?
I was on honeymoon in Paris.
He an impoverished Italian Jew.
We would recite Verlaine
under his black umbrella
in the warm summer rain.
He begged me, don’t go back to Russia.
I did.
That winter he wrote me:
Vous êtes en moi comme une hantise;
You are obsessively part of me.
And I knew it was true,
that he was more myself
than my own familiar hands.
Back in St. Petersburg,
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,
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
I was not transformed into salt
but into chalk on paper.
Modigliani always drew me
in long spare lines—but never
while we were together.
Always from memory when he was alone.
With me, his hands
were too busy for crayons,
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.
They’ve not yet made
a corset that will fit me—
how could it when I
am all of Russia?
I loved him. Wrote him poems.
Left red roses strewn on his floor.
How airy the light was then.
That was before we knew
what our art was for.
We thought it was for each other.
We thought it was for love.
