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Woman at a Window, After Hopper

Kai Moreno

Ekphrastic · Solitude · Wonder

He is famous for the light, but look at her.The way she has arranged herself to bealone on purpose, in the yellow oblongthe morning lays across the empty floor.

We are taught to read her as a loneliness.The tour groups murmur it — so sad, so still.But I have sat exactly where she sits,in exactly that reclaimed and guarded light,

and I can tell you what the painter knewand would not say, because a title can't:that this is not the picture of a lack.This is a woman no one is about

to need. This is the one hour of her daythat belongs to no one's mouth or hands or clock.He caught her in the instant before the worldremembers where she lives. Look how she keeps it.

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Up nextA Letter to Whoever Is Running ThisTo whoever is running this: I am not writing to complain. I want that on the record first, because everyone writes to you to complain, and you must be so tired of the mail. I am writing to say that the pomegranate is ridiculous. That you did not have to make the inside look like that. That a thing we eat could have been plain, could have been a potato, and instead it is a chandelier of small red rooms, and no one asked you to, and you did it anyway. I am writing to say I noticed. I am writing to say that if this is all there is — the pomegranate, the light on the taxis, the particular person asleep in the other room breathing like the tide coming in — then it was, on balance, worth the trouble of existing, and I withdraw, provisionally, every complaint I have not yet sent.