Sample Poems by Jacqueline Kolosov
Souvenir: Modigliani Remembers Anna Akhmatova
A winter’s night, and the whole
icebound garden sparkles
and crackles. I wonder
if she thinks about me at all, though I know
there is no path back. Memory
whispers in my ear, and the horse chestnuts
lean close to listen.
Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu?
—chanting Verlaine
on those end of summer afternoons,
we walked through these same gardens,
then sat close together,
my old, black umbrella between us
as the rain fell, and a mist
rose in the soft heat
so that the last flowers glowed.
My lips brushed her cheek.
“I want my work to fly.”
She replied, “I admire you
because you are not like the others,
the cubists who reduce a human being
to geometry.”
Our bodies were drenched, our minds
for the moment alike—and yet
seven years have passed since she last wrote
from Tsarskoye Selo
of the sharp cries of the migrating
cranes, sunset on dark firs,
and the yellow circle
her lamp cast on the blue writing paper
as she sat gazing
at the hoarfrost on the glass,
her thoughts of me
not as I am now,
but as I most desire to remember
myself, bathed in golden light:
noble, courteous, speaking
only of art.
In one of those blue letters
she spoke of me “enclosed in a ring
of solitude”: that lambent circle
I must still try to live within.
She lives there, too.
“Why we communicate”:
her words, spoken that first time
I slipped the thin chemise
from her shoulders. Souvenir,
souvenir, que me veux-tu?
Or later, coming home
to find a dozen roses arrayed
on the bed. When we met outside
her hotel, I asked, “How
did you get in? The studio door was locked.”
And she smiled
in such an idle way
as to forever seal
her affinity with the Egyptian queens,
and said, “I didn’t.
I tossed the roses through the window
one by one.”
Looking for Modigliani
Hard to find you along the staccato cliffs
of Capri, though you and Eugenia wintered here,
plucking sapphires from a capricious sea,
tossing them high into the vault of sky
where they became cacti, stars, whirlpools.
Still dizzy with Wilde’s vision of artist
lit by the Gioconda’s smile, you
traveled next to Rome. Here, too,
I search in vain for your long echoes,
though as you would, I scorn the tourist
eye of the video camera, running
from one masterpiece
to another, invading the silences.
What they could never understand:
the jewel of Rome lay not without
but within. Her feverish sweetness,
her tragic countryside, all these are mine.
Confident of bodying forth
the blue depths, you forsook
the ruby-throated Mediterranean
for a foreign city and a strange language.
‘O Paris, Gare centrale debarcadere
des volontes carrefour des inquietudes’:
where a mattress-maker stacked
paintings by the dozen, and nearby
at the Café Rotonde, artists,
circus performers, and revolutionaries
drank, dreamt, and argued.
So you joined them,
dressed in a suit of velvet, a silk scarf fanning
the air. Here, you made thumb sketches
like arabesques, searching for a language
capable of expressing what
you already knew. Je suis triste.
Understanding, you smile back.
First Meeting, Lunia
The Polish émigré, Lunia Czechowska, became one of Modigliani’s closest friends and posed for numerous portraits.
You wear new stockings, shimmer,
as you sit in the inflorescent moon-
light on the terrace of that queer café,
seized by fatigue and the mercurial
energies pulsing in and around you.
A rustling in the chestnuts, he
approaches. Eyes whisper, I adore you.
Cigarettes at once are handed round.
Pencils tumble from his pockets,
a silver flask, a squirrel-tipped brush.
Once you, too, worshipped at this altar,
but found you could not live
on moonlight alone. Around your finger,
a band of diamonds; around your throat,
Maman’s clutch of pearls. In the café,
his eyes upon you—Beneath this moon,
face like a madonna’s, where is your man?
Indulge such possibilities, and you’ll be
lost. Besides, you like life as a soldier’s wife;
so many days like freshwater pearls.
Circling, his voice already sketching,
once again, that Sphinx’s stare.
Were the café a pyramid along the Nile….
You suppress the thought, sip iced anisette.
Moonlight swims through your hair.
Feverish strokes swiftly capture the face
you’ve laid bare around the soiled cups,
the brooding pigeons, café chatter.
An immortal you is on the rise.
Around you, a murmuring of the gods.