Midnight
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The Poem
Midnight
She is in the mirror.This is where Hopper always put the truth —not in the face turned toward youbut in the reflection, the distortion,the version of a person that appearswhen they are not performing being seen.
She didn’t know I was looking.Neither did Hopper. Neither do I.This is the only way to see what’s actually there.
Only in the reflection
Nobody is on the street.The city performing its geometry without its people,the light falling on the sidewalk for no one,the diner lit from insidethe way a stage is lit after the audience has already left.
The audience always leaves in Hopper.The figures remain.
Nobody communicates.They are in the same room the way strangers are in the same room —present, proximate,entirely elsewhere in the ways that matter.
I find myself in this.The older I get the more I want to be invisible —not gone, not absent —the Hopper kind,the kind where you are in the lit window at midnightwatching the empty streetand feeling, for once, that the watching is enough.That you don’t have to be watched back.
The watching is enough
The Brooklyn Bridge hovers above the diner.The way the past hovers above the present —not gone, just above,present in the peripheral waythat the things you carry are always present.
Behind the painting she is drowning in the East River.To the left, the war is on the shore —the blackout drills,the Brooklyn darkness of a city that turned off its lights and waitedand the waiting looked exactly like this.
It feels like now.The empty street.The figures in the light who have stopped talking to each other.The bridge above everything.The war on the shore we keep calling something else.
Hopper painted 1942 and he painted nowand he painted the hour when the city is most honestbecause no one is performing being a city —just the light, just the diner,just the figures who came because the dark was worseand are now not entirely sure they made the right call.
I find myself in him.Not in the misery —though I understand the misery of seeing everything clearlywithout the comfort of connection —in the watching.In the mirror.In the street at midnightwhen the wanting to be invisible is the most honest thing about youand you let it be.
She is in the mirror. She is in the windshield.The truest version. The Hopper version.The midnight version that exists only when the street is emptyand the bridge hovers and the war is on the shoreand the light in the diner falls on the figureswho came because the dark was worse —watched only in the reflection, only in the glass,only in the hour the city has finally stopped performing —
which is the only hour Hopper cared about,
which is the only hour I recognize myself completely,
which is midnight,
which is now,
which is the moment just before the light changes.