Why Not Write a Novel
Make it historical. Akhmatova doesn't return
to Petersburg and Modigliani doesn't succumb
to TB. They take a ramshackle villa near Lucca.
She pens odes to the future, to oregano, noirs
under a pseudonym. He paints her angular
Slavic cheeks, that long lean body, draped
in electric blue. Picasso and Diaghilev make
cameos. Amedeo fleshes out his nudes,
accommodating Anna and her swelling belly.
Marina and Nikolai follow fast on the heels
of little Sergei, and all goes well for a while
but then—what? Envying gods? Il diavolo?
The basic fuck-up of forty-six chromosomes?
Something—that stealthy certain something—
slips in. Amedeo trysts with the lithe ragazza
and her auburn hair. Anna banks fire with fire,
and free love isn't, not now, when the bambini
need looking after and Amedeo's not selling
and no one, even in this fiction, reads poems—
and anyway the storm clouds are goose-stepping
through Umbria, because you can only change
so much, and if the TB didn't get Amedeo,
his circumcised dick would, and Anna
would be lined up in the predawn frost
before a different pack of thugs, waiting
to ask about her missing men again.
Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved
Parnassus, 2001
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