Jilted, by Wendy Hawken

Hotel Room, by Edward Hopper (USA) 1931

Jilted
 
A woman in a peach slip--
remember slips?--sitting on the bed’s edge 
 
reads a piece of paper held like a tray:
thumbs on top, fingers underneath. 
 
A lover’s note of apology?
The docent says train schedule.
 
I am old enough to know, 
yes, they looked like that. 
 
The hotel room a spare but complicated 
space—it is a Hopper, after all. 
 
Absorbed by what she reads, 
the woman--Jo, his wife, again that docent--
 
sits framed within a frame. Her day clothes 
laid with care across the chair, suitcase and valise
 
unopened where she dropped them, 
the yellow window shade three-quarters 
 
down against the flat black night.
Kicked-off heels her one untidy moment 
 
as she undressed, sat to read, 
lamplight illuminating her thighs. 
 
Wendy Hawken
  
Wendy Hawken: "I live on a grass farm in the northern Shenandoah Valley where the weather means more than what clothes to wear. In 2005 I earned an MFA in Poetry at Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers, decades after a BA in English literature. Previous publications include three chapbooks plus two full collections, The Luck of Being (2008) and White Bird (2017) a sequence about my husband’s battle with cancer."