Modigliani’s Eyes

FOOD FOR THOUGHT, 25 Aug 2025

Gary Corseri – TRANSCEND Media Service

Elvira, Resting at a Table

1.
Modigliani’s models’ eyes
are pupil-less, iris-less,
(or, sometimes, one’s inverted,
the other looking not-quite out).

In bistros, for a song (or less),
he sells his eyes,
knows he’s dying (from an early age),
but will not, cannot
bow—convention damn him!—
to any god except his own
idiosyncratic self!

2.
His first love, sculpture,
did him in—dust,
damn dust, filling his lungs!

So… now he models in oil–
burly, feminine hermaphrodites,
capturing, perhaps, his own hybridicness–
Sephardic-Jewish, Tuscan-bred,
with hooded eyes women adore,
whom he loves in kind,
painting them with swan-like necks,
or bulging like amphoras on couches;
arched bodies—nude,
except for what he hides in eyes….

(The background’s paneled, dark;
The women curve out of the frame:
neck, hips, buttocks, breasts,
S-curving into music.)

In the last two years of thirty-five,
his backgrounds flare— suffused, light-held.

Happier with his new mistress now,
he has absorbed
Impressionistic fire-licks—
translucent color, and a sense
of his own imminent

demise
(which, he imagines,
he’ll transcend….)

3.
With a little money
he would have married that woman
who bore him a son…
and killed herself
after he died—

the day after, in fact,
though she was pregnant
again….

________________________________________

Gary Steven Corseri is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.  He is the grandson of Ukrainian-Jewish and Sicilian-Catholic immigrants.  Gary has performed his poems at the Carter Presidential Library and his dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta and in universities, high schools and Little Theaters.  He has published 2 novels, 1 full collection and 1 prize-winning chapbook of poems.  His poems, articles, fiction and dramas have appeared in hundreds of global publications & websites, including:  Countercurrents, Village Voice, Redbook Magazine, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, and Transcend Media Service.  He has taught at universities in the U.S. and Japan, and in US prisons and public schools.  He has worked as a grape-picker in Australia, a gas-station attendant, and an editor. Contact: garyscorseri@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 25 Aug 2025.

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