They sometimes seem to float. Small faces from an ocean of fabrics and lace, Meninas, Infantas, two hands. Van Dyke's Marchesa Balbi seems unconcerned though drowning in brocade and umber backgrounds, that her three most expressive appendages have been separated, floated to the surface of beautiful dry goods, painted ocean a Persian rug, bright face oblivious. There are rooms of such poignant dangers in every museum, where many are relying on a fan or lavish lace cuffs, as if such small wings could lift them. And the faces disconnected from the hands, from each other, one smoothing a book page, recounting its own life as if surfacing downshore, independently surviving a rapids and its foam of lace, finding themselves safe among strangers. As long as the painting are alive, as much as reproduction is a birth, they are secure. We can imagine for them a body below the surface, keep reassuring their eyes we will keep them afloat in our remembering oceans, in books and post cards, their sea wings oily and buoyant, often one finger pointing at the dark and bottomless floor.

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Allan Peterson has been published in The Gettysburg Review, The Florida Review, Beloit Poetry Journal Salt Hill and has work forthcoming in Willow Springs and Georgetown Review.

A recepient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, he is the author of Small Charities (Panhandler Press) and Stars On A Wire (Parallel Editions). "Saved In Paintings" is from an unpulished poetry manuscript titled Remains to be Seen