A Painting I Can’t Remember 7
I recall loneliness is cousin
to privacy when I turn the glossy
pages in a monograph. Long-dead
makers and their quiet study
capture the intangible of a person
standing in a field or looking out a window
always interior in the exterior.
Are all paintings lonely?
I remember that Edward Hopper painteda cartoonish ramshackle row of buildings,an emblem of my mid-twenties when I feltlike a citizen of Hopper’s world, his emptycafé, that goofy city. To remember is to call upthe self I once was, loneliness housed bycalled body made of sinew, the horse stilldeep in the marble. I was wounding and pain,fashion and bad posture. The Hopper citylives in the fabric of those years. It is my portrait,head shaped like an egg. I studied the egg, saidConstantin Brancusi, and everything I learnedcame from that study. Why has that gnosticadage stayed with me so long when wiserwisdoms might have served me better, burnedinto my mind the way or kept me alive. The holistic selfwound into a single egg: wrapped up in it, I’m rapt.
