You could say she looks familiar, perhaps a woman you’ve seen while walking down the crowded sidewalks in a city you’re not a native of; her olive features appears she may be a descendant of that boot shaped peninsula in southern Europe, the one that lost its might and will to fight at the decimation of the Roman Empire, transforming itself into a nation of seduction rather brute force. Modigliani is Italy, and so is she, Marie, the daughter of the people, appearing in 1918, in the 24 year of Modigliani’s life, 2 years prior to his death. Perhaps it was an homage to a death he knew was impending, an inevitable obituary one writes, savoring their own vanity, so gargantuan, the subject of death itself fails to render it obsolete.
This voice, all canvas, all olive texture in the frame, form and symmetry of Marie, is latent, then and now, a war-cry given a century after the conclusion of a war that has wiped clean a nation once occupied by its own illusions. Does this explain the grey emptiness in the eyes of Marie? Or the elongated stretch of her body, as if she herself is peering through a window with a distorted view as to investigate the gossip of a world gone quiet herself? And does she ever conclude those rumors to be of substantial truth?
Indeed she does; so she pulls her hair behind her neck, wraps it in a dense black tie, dresses herself too in black, becoming two years prior, an attendant at the burial of her creator, her peace spoken from the dazzling arches of dulled lips.
-Dontrell Lovet't
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