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 ãenclosed in a ring of solitudeä: that lambent circle I must still try to live within. She lives there, too. ãWhy we communicateä: 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, ãHow did you get in? The studio door was locked.ä And she smiled in such an idle way as to forever seal her affinity with the Egyptian queens, and said, ãI didnât. I tossed the roses through the window one by one.ä Jacqueline Kolosov is the author of two chapbooks: FabergŽ (Finishing Line, 2003) and Danish Ocean (under the name Jacqueline McLean, Pudding House, 2001). "Souvenir" is part of Modiglianiâs Muse, a book-length manuscript exploring the artistâs life in poetry. In January, she will travel to Paris to collaborate with photographer Alex Pitt on an exhibition that brings together the Modigliani poems with photographs that reawaken the artistâs Paris. She teaches at Texas Tech University.