Collioure
after Matisse’s Open Window at Collioure
All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams
the quivering edge of possibility,
the disappearing thimbleful of honeyed happiness.
As we gaze at Matisse’s open window
on Collioure, colored
with daubs of orange, azure, lime,
light expands. We travel through the window
into the gleaming pink Mediterranean, suspended
between earth and heaven.
The frame leads us out and up
to worship–not in the cathedral of Notre Dame
but the church of this world.
Green vines ascend the frame into the sky,
turquoise and purple stain the window as
inside dissolves into outside, here into there, until there is only light.
“I cannot paint the light,” Matisse lamented
until the beast within him struggled forth
to prance on curtain fringes and still life surfaces–
so much abundance color cannot contain it,
as if the very air spilled forth its secret
joy, the exhalation of a moment.
A green sailboat, halfway up the window, floats
in the rosy radiance of a summer day:
limpid, liquid, timeless.
Note: The opening line is from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”
After teaching English for thirty years, Elissa Greenwald earned an MFA in 2024. Recent poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Blueline, Brevity, humana obscura, Miracle Monocle, and elsewhere.
