Portrait of an art historian

Beaming Degas
over floral print wallpaper,
the slide projector
squats at the end of its leash. She revamps a lecture
that's older than most of her students.
"Degas pulls our gaze to the crooked stance
of the book-taker
in the back
room. He has us crane through the windows,
open as guillotines." She wonders
if she has been doing
this for too long:
appreciation thaws to habit.
She still feels for Manet's
maid at the overstocked bar,
bearing her wrists, saddened and bored
despite the spectacle: chandeliers hang
like rain clouds, while the height of Parisian
entertainment is cut from the frame:
the trapeze artist's ankles are all that remain.
A gentlemen addresses her bib of pale skin
for a flute of Brut and a clementine.

*

After thirty-some
years, her thumb
is attuned to the undergraduate attention span.
She clicks ' the projector draws a blank.
Manet's Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère
is missing. Instead, a spotlit square
of Seventies design that was once de rigeur:
her first, wild and bodged try at DIY. There
is a reason she lectures on peinture claire
rather than going at it herself with a horse-hair
brush: the wallpaper sheets
overlap; rose stems splint
where they ought to meet.
An aesthete
would cringe, wanting symmetry
and beauty,
but as her cow-licked
fringe stands to attest, she is not so afflicted.
It's dark outside,
as well as in, when the slide
reel circles back to Degas. Her lecture
sounds a decade younger.
Hungry, tired, trawling
through the fruit bowl
by heft and gloss,
she plumps for the obvious
dissection, an easy way in,
and turbans her thumb with a clementine.