Ekphrastic Poems on the paintings of Edward Hopper by Matthew Riley.

From the forthcoming book, Buildings Have Eyes and People Will Not See Beauty in their Sadness: Ekphrastic Poems on the paintings of Edward Hopper by Matthew Riley.

 

Edward Hopper, Western Motel, 1957.

Soul Stealer 

She is posing for a picture. The layers of meaning are striking, as sharp as this western sun creating geometry on the green walls and floor. Sharp angles and rectangles. What does the sun know?

Here is a painting, a metaphor. A painting of a photograph, also a metaphor. We assume the woman is of real substance at the source of these metaphors.  What is she thinking? How do I look? The photographer: am I capturing her essence? The painter: am I capturing the essence?

On the hills outside her window I can imagine horses, native people moving up, down, and through. And the woman would still be a metaphor, a metaphor for an unknowable substance. And yet something like the angles of light as known or unknown by the sun.

Is this what native people call a soul-stealer? Only sadness comes from dwelling on the past…. when the past is not a part of the whole. And here the automobile, green of the hills and in their modality. Their lines like synonyms ready for the future to reveal their opposites. That which is part of the whole; that which is a metaphor for future and past. Time is a metaphor, not of real substance, is this what the sun knows?

And at the center of it all, the woman, looking directly at you, so serious. Saying see how far we have come, how far I have come. I have come from the east coast, driving west in my shining green automobile. See how sleek. The hills in the distance do not even compare. How slowly they change, ages hence they will still be the same. And I will be gone. I will be gone. Is this what the sun knows? Why Christ said to store up our treasures in Heaven?