Modigliani, While You Can, by Adele Ne Jame

The Artist's Wife, by Amedeo Modigliani (Italy) 1918

Modigliani, While You Can

​for Jeanne Hebuturne, devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice
 
Someone might have said go to her tonight, 
say something tender-- like her voice is 
a faint tune in the wind you always hear. 
 
She is your bright star burning 
in the night sky. Shower her 
with your words, not only lavish
 
paint on canvas. She is like 
the stunning Cereus--
queen of the night, you know, Modi, 
 
the gorgeous one that spirals toward 
the heavens, the one with a myriad of blooms 
that intoxicates the air you breathe
 
every minute.  Whisper it  
even while she sleeps. Lay a garland of
violets around her shoulders while 
 
her magnificent dark hair falls over 
her pillow in the cold Paris wind 
that sweeps through her open window.
 
You don’t know that she, 
your haven of rest,
is a fast-fading apparition, 
 
the one you will long for 
in your last hours.
So, again lay the rain-soaked 

words of the poet around her— 
from the master:
This living hand now warm and capable of 
 
earnest grasping would if it could---
or whisper your own 
La Vita Nuova to her. While you can, 
 
Modi, leave the raucous midnight café, 
your sketches of friends at crowded tables, 
the bottles of fine Beaujolais and go to her. 
 
Your death masque will come soon enough, 
yours first, then keeping the pact, hers 
so quickly following you— 
 
Your friends will come soon enough 
to lay bewildered flowers 
on the sidewalk below her window
 
after her swoon to death there--
hers and your unborn child’s. 
Then all the roses and violets 
 
piled there will wash away 
in a flood of night rain--
so that all we will have left,
 
will be your repose together
finally at du Pere Lachaise
and her blurred, immortal blue eyes,
 
too beautiful, too intimate to paint, 
your muse, called wife,
so filled with love and desire for you. 
 
Then only her silent beauty 
on your canvas--
will be left behind to breaks our hearts.
 
Adele Ne Jame

​Adele Ne Jame "I have published three books of poems and won many awards including a National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, a Eliott Cades Award for Literature and a Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. My poems have been published in many fine journals such as Ploughshares, the Atlanta Review, the Notre Dame Review and others. I have served as the Poet-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I've taught creative writing at the university level in Hawai'i for many years. My poems as broadsides have been exhibited in the Sharjah/Dubai Biennial and at the Arab American National Museum. I was recently honored to be selected as the Mikhail Series lecturer at Toledo University."