Modigliani’s drinking once again,

besotted by divine, Olympian wine.

Like other young, bedeviled, hapless men,

he’s feeling O so fine.

The music of the spheres is ringing round.

His limber limbs elongate. They reach up,

then fall onto cold, unforgiving ground.

He refills his spilled cup.

Renoir laughs – heartened by this lithe display

of puppet-dancing round a statue of

big-bellied Balzac. Reaching every way

inspires lively love.

HERB WAHLSTEEN was a finalist in the Yale Series of Younger Poets contest, placed 3rd in the Writer’s Digest 77th Annual Writing Competition: Rhyming Category, and has had poems published in: Long Island Quarterly, the Great South Bay Magazine, The Long Islander, The Lyric magazine, Paumanok Interwoven, Suffolk County Poetry Review, Bards Annual, Form Quarterly, Bards Against Hunger, 13 Days of Halloween, Poets to Come, The Hands We Hold, A Tree in a Garden of Ashes, Beat Poets Anthology, String Poet (2 poems translated from the French, 2 poems translated from the Spanish), Pratik; A Magazine of Contemporary Writing, and Measure magazine.