Two Poems

 Perhaps a Few Moments in Edward Hopper’s Childhood

The Hopper boy stands tall

Now four p.m. in his side yard

Waiting for the sun, its light to hit and break

Upon his childhood house, casting, finally, a gift

A shadow boxed on the grass

He plants his feet on the bright dark line

No middle ground, shoes off every day

To feel that edge, his centre

Heat on one side, cool on the other

He uses the push mower to cut an

Outline, a comfort, a green rectangle

His mother watches from the porch

She’s tall, gangly in a cotton dress

She walks over and stands with her son

They watch the insects fly in and out of the light

She says, in the shadow, They look all gone, Ed

After dinner, his father places three kitchen chairs on the lawn

They want to sit and watch the summer sun cut into the scrub oaks

 

Separate Bedrooms

My brothers—two action dirt boys

Live in rooms at the back of the house

They own large desks on sawhorses

Worktables covered in model glue and

Model paint splashed on toy cars and hammers

Stuck to blocks and nails used to transport the glue

Now stuck to drawings of war with planes and ships firing

Rockets at soldiers in uniforms splattered with limbs-gone-missing-shattered-red

And the dirt boys

They have special clothing

Piles of it serviceable

Durable military Cub Scout-Boy Scout

Forward-moving charted by rank

And sticky cardboard tanks

Go—my room is for you

At the top of the stairs

I survive like the carpeting

Durable pristine well-scrubbed

Good as swirling gold

For flow for martinis to be sipped

While dolls from Germany or Switzerland are admired

By smiling red-eyed adults

Enjoying my horizon

The entire box set of me

My exhibit of crisp white eyelet

I will be crisp eyelet