Impressions by Sarah Jane Collins (@sarahjanemaree)

[[[Naomi’s note:  June 22, 2021. On the occasion of our dear SJ’s birthday, I’d like to publish a poem she sent me in thick of spring. I love it for the obvious reasons that I might love a poem—it deals in visual art, the sensuousness of the human body and how it also imprisons us—but also because of its narrative unwillingness to focus. She reminds of one of my favorite poets James Schuyler (1923–1991). The two find kinship in a constant reorientation between the personal and the immediately perceived; a tender impulse to be in constant, private wonder of the circumstances of one’s own life.]]]


there was fog hanging
in the sky as I streaked
from New York for the first
time in a while, away from
you
                        and

all the things you
                                    make me feel

                                                    the long fine fingers on Degas’
                                                                                                 brother’s hand

the veins running gentle under his
fragile skin
              in tracts

calling back
to when I knew
what it was to push the
prints of my tips into the spaces between your thin
bones
       
                                                smooth and taut like the glass of this bay            I’m sailing on by
                                                                                                   
back where the metal mountains stop the sun
you’re somewhere
                                                but I won’t ever know where again
                                                                                                                    and I’m
numb

or at least
I thought I was

a kind text that takes me by surprise
the cherries in Manet’s model’s grasp
the way the Normandy coastal path
looks just like
                                                            Straddie
                                                                            or maybe Caloundra
where the ribs of a ship are eaten
by sand and sun
                                                                    scatters dizzily, opening the way
Monet’s caught it here

Turner sinks the bodies of the enslaved into a sea
                                                                              the pinks and creams
                                                                                            of the condemned late afternoon
a reminder
of the wretchedness of my flesh

And there is quiet on the rug
where Sargent
                                                                               renders little rich girls between two urns
filled with notes and favors
left behind 
                                for curators to find

on the way home I chase the sun west and think
of how I miss your warmth

but then I remember

how fleeting
it really was