an abstract woman of 1917,

no fashion plate, no Cézanne, the long-faced strong-chinned woman
(Modigliani’s masked apparition

in a print I got for nothing, one

thrown out of the Library

of the School of Art

and stuck on my bedroom wall for

20 years)
with fire-orange hair,

left forearm perched like

a bibulous pink toucan

on the orange back of the chair,

right arm dangling,

shapeless dress of bluish-grey,

neckline askew,

distinguished mainly by being

darker than the dirty background
the artist’s expressionless model like an ad

for absinthe
head tilted

eyes a limpid tadpole swimming to a black half-moon

neck and right shoulder a pink swan

the very antithesis of hard work

guaranteed to wreak havoc on all that is decent and bourgeois
how often have I felt like her

(how often, as I grow old)

doomed model to a doomed artist,

a gorgeous, grubby wraith on my wall who can never grow old,

hidden hand holding perhaps a paintbrush,

or a dagger or a pistol or a blue flower,

sitter for a dying painter,

a Jew fond of Nietzsche cursed on Mount Parnassus,

an addict hallucinating in a garret within earshot of the Great War,

worth more than Cézanne the day after he died,

and pickled for immortality.


Notes:

Conventional ekphrastic with elements of notional ekphrastic poem, referencing a specific

print I have of Modigliani’s Woman with Red Hair. At the base of the print it

states on one line: ‛AMEDEO MODIGLIANI — Woman with Red Hair — National Gallery of Art,

Washington D.C. (Chester Dale Collection) Published by Shorewood Publishers, Inc.

Distributed by Penn Prints, New York’.