Three poems from the forthcoming book “A Son of the Stars” – Carmelo Militano

October, 1909, Brancusi studio, 54 rue du Montparnasse

Or a short history of Modi’s career as a sculptor

 

The new Modi is actually the old Modi

Returned to Paris in sartorial splendor

Loose grey shirt, broad silk knotted scarf

Dark leather boots and pants

One bent leg on the bench leans forward

In the photo he looks defiant and posed, cigarette in left hand,

Other hand is on his right hip, eyes wounded and vague

Affair with Elvira is new

The vogue in Montmartre: cocaine, ether, lesbianism and Cubism

-2-

Between 1909 and 1912 Modi and I work together

Reject Rodin’s method of first constructing the work

Using clay shaped over and over again

On an armature then a plaster cast, next a metal mold

Filled with red hot bronze and left to cool

I tell Modi: ‘What good is the practice of modeling?

It leads to sculptured cadavers.’

Only what has been cut from stone beginning to end is true sculpture

Stone waits for the sculpture to release image already there

The same way paper waits for the poem

Both emerge from the will to shape desire

Create and organize surprise with each cut, each word.

-3-

Modi moves between Montmartre and Montparnasse

Between painting and sculpture

Between two groups of artists who often hate each other

Steals wood and stone from Metro construction sites

We sometimes carve together

From my cuts face emerges round as a pear

Curved stone refined like a scalloped shell

Modi carves mysterious posed masks

 

Nose cut sharp as a knife, slanted olive-eyes

Pressed small thin lips, chorographic hair like tiny rivers

Compressed serene sorrow surges into and out of stone

-4-

Augustus John the Welsh Painter visits Modigliani’s studio in Montmartre

Buys two sculptures: ‘For some days afterwards I found myself

Under the hallucination of meeting people in the street who might

Have posed for them… Can Modi have discovered a new secret aspect of reality?’

-5-

Meanwhile near Place Saint Michel, the cut poem:

 

In a station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough

Ezra Pound

-6-

Nina Hamnett, artist, writer, bisexual Queen of Bohemia (Paris)

Visits Modigliani’s messy and dirty studio on rue St. Gothard

Admires full figured sensual caryatid drawings on the wall

For an unfinished ‘temple of pleasure’,

Carved heads, ‘pillars of tenderness,’ are under the window

Near the end of the bed is a large spider web and a large black spider

He has grown attached to it he says

Calls the spider his only painting companion

Does not wish to disturb

Flattered, she can ignore poverty

But the spider makes her nervous and refuses him

Nina then dance naked for me again, he says

The way you did at the Café Rotonde

Let me delight in your slender legs and body

Large tear-drop tits, neatly trimmed and scented red pubic hair.

 

 

Anna Akhmatova, Paris, April, 1910 & May, 1911

 

After three years of pursuit, declarations of love

I married a famous poet, literary critic, traveler

I do not know whether or not I love Nicolay Gumilyov

It seems it is my fate to be his wife

We are here on our honeymoon

He gives lectures, attends meetings

I sit in the same café everyday and drink my morning coffee

Dryly read the newspaper, write in my journal

-2-

Modigliani’s beautiful classical French fell on me

Like an unexpected shadow from a Baudelaire poem

I cannot forget his voice, in his eyes a golden gleam

Accompanied by exquisite manners

No friend, no past lover, never mundane things

Only a quiet ring of solitude and a love of sculpture

‘He was that rarity, a painter who knew and loved poetry.’

Recited by the hour Laforge, Mallarme, Lautréamont

-3-

A year later waits for me in the Salon des Independants

He does not approach when I finally appear

Instead we visit the Egyptian department at the Louvre

He dreams only of Egypt ‘the rest is of no importance.’

Rejects Cubism, anything fashionable,

Makes little money, winter in Paris is harsh

He is thinner, eyes sunk deeper

Proud aristocrat heart and soul

How does he survive?

Still handsome next to the Venus di Milo, he says:

‘Women of beauty worthy of painting or sculpting

seem heavily dressed in their clothes.’

 

 

-4-

Firm right hand moves forward and back again like a wave

He draws a quick thin charcoal line

Then an unexpected curve

Slanted eyeless head rests on my slender shoulder

Arm on an angle

Singular small round tit captured

So is the gentle bump of my stomach

I emerge a sleeping nude Venus on cushions

Fresh from the blank white sea.

He squints to study each line, lips pressed concentrating

Satisfied he kisses my toes

Considers the inside of my knee

I let him travel up the length of my thigh

Inhale my scent

Pauses to ask about the little prisoner

Trapped at the top of my moist hill

I blush pink, red, and white like a cherry blossom.

Slow sly shy grin emerges

He says my face shows divine progress.

-5-

On a bench in the Jardins du Luxembourg

Recited Verlaine under his old black umbrella

Delighted we remembered the same verses

Soft tap of summer rain kept the beat

At night it was his footsteps under my window.

-6-

His door locked

I toss a surprise bouquet of roses

One by one through an open window

He returned to find a formed charmed pattern

Convinced I somehow entered.

–

 

-7-

 

You say I ignite you

Through poems

Your gypsy soul flares

I am your female Cesare:

   I found, I saw, I know

Your sad eyed mystery opens and closes

Shadow on the claire de lune streets of the Latin Quartier

-8-

Our destiny began when I did not return to Paris

Melancholy and poems followed

Both were there already under our skin, our eyes

Tarnish already there inside the dream, on the silver streets

Never in my heart.

 

 

 

Multiples of Me

 

I am a handsome elegant Italian young man

So lordly, so cultivated, so exquisite, so kind-hearted

Lover, artist, even-tempered, distinguished

Corrupted by Paris, corrupted by Lautréamont

 

I am an unbearable buffoon,

I cannot stand nor keep away from alcohol

The weak author of my own downfall

Ruined by drugs, by La Vie Boheme, by poetry

By women and song, by youth, by poverty

By an indulgent mother, by artists, by masks

 

I am the most literate painter in all of Montparnasse

I memorize Dante, Leopardi, Villon, Baudelaire, Nietzsche

I am psychic and follower of Nostradamus

I am the one who believes the artist is an aristocrat of feeling

 

 

I reject in no particular order: Renoir’s aesthetic (nudes) caressing buttocks,

Rodin, Picasso & the Cubist crowd, Futurists, bourgeois domesticity,

Systems of power, narrative paintings, background, the light in Nice

 

I am the painter everyone remembers after the world made famous

I am the painter made famous by disaster, failure, and Garsin irony.

 

Carmelo Militano is an award winning poet & writer.Hi smost recent novel Lost Aria, Ekstasis Edition 2018 has been shortlisted for the Margaret Laurence Award for fiction.He won the F.G. Bressani award for poetry in 2004 for his chapbook Ariadne’s Thread. His poetry includes the collections Morning After You and The Stone Mason’s Notebook. Militano’s novel Sebastiano’s Vine was short-listed for the Margaret Laurence fiction prize and his non-fiction work The Fate of Olives was also short-listed.  His reviews, essays, and literary interviews have appeared in journals across Canada. Militano currently hosts and produces the P.I. New Poetry show, CKUW 95.9 FM, University of Winnipeg. Lost Aria is his fifth book.