A Woman In the Sun

Light is kin to vapor, to certain fogs, and the effervescence of ideas, yet Edward Hopper’s summer light, when it comes late in the afternoon, is solid, opaque, the color of soft butter, heavy with heat and remorse, raking low through the window, its yellow rectangle falling across the floor. The woman is nude, standing still, alone in that block of light, the shadows of her legs subtracting thick black lines behind her, pointing toward the door not seen through which her lover departed only a moment ago. See how the bedcover is rolled down, the sheets wrinkled, the after-cigarette casually held in her right hand while she stares absent-mindedly at the floor as smokers will do between drags, lost in thought and recollection and questions of how did it come to this? Her angular naked body, no doubt soft and yielding while in the throes, has become a rough impasto, perhaps Hopper’s way of portraying her authentic self. Oddly, her left breast appears to be an afterthought, forcing her shoulders toward me, while her hips and eyes face the window. Can the human body rotate this way, clockwise and anticlockwise and clockwise simultaneously, requiring the oddest skeletal geometry? My own geometry is a more modest version of this torsion, so perhaps Hopper’s vision isn’t impossible after all. Perhaps... Her lover has gone now, the afternoon’s business done. They will go their separate ways, which was the plan all along, of course. http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/interior/hopper.woman-sun.jpg