The following poem was included in the 2024 Adelaide Literary Magazine poetry anthology. Thank you!

This poem riffs on on a painting, Edward Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea from 1951 (cropped thumbnail to the right)
-> Visit the Yale Art Museum to see the painting!
Or, if you can’t make it to New Haven, CT, you may view it in high resolution, at the Yale University Art Gallery website

 

Rooms by the Sea

Out of the blue
a polygon of light
steps into the room
and opens a bright
door onto places
where to drown
and where to fall
and all
interior calm
is shaken up like the invisible cushion
on the couch,
like a pouch
of tobacco
lodged in the pocket
of a non-smoking cowboy
who keeps riding off and off
into the glow
that shrouds the dying day.

Which may be as it is,
or may be otherwise.
Where there’s no seagull
there may still be
seagull cries.
The blue says: Ahoy!
And who is to tell,
whether sea reflects sky,
or sea reflects shell
(like the murmur you hear
when held to the ear),
which is why
top and bottom,
inside and out
converge like a cloud
with the sun that it covers.

The door is open,
there is a way,
and if I fail to take it
the moment may go away.
– Or maybe the moment will stay
and only get better?
Yet what better fit
for the moment than now?
– Let’s do it.
But do what?
That I don’t know,
that I do not know,
but let’s hope
that it’ll turn out well,
that the world is your shell
with mother of pearl above
and that within and without
fit together,
fit together
like hand in glove.