Night Windows, by Mark A. Murphy

Night Windows, by Edward Hopper (USA) 1928.

Night Windows

Imagine the scene inside this New York apartment
through the three windows,
one open to the midnight air, a translucent blue
curtain billowing in the cold breeze,
two closed to the sound
of the desperate corner traffic below
where a young woman attends to her private affairs,
her toilet, her telephone conversation
with her estranged husband,
her "unexamined life," played out
in partial view of the artist/voyeur scrutinising
the night windows, three floors up.

Imagine again our heroine (for all women who live
alone in the city of dreams/the city 
that never sleeps
are de facto heroines) bending over
in her pink/mauve dress, revealing her formidable
backside, to read the weekly best-seller lists
in the NY Times, where Winnie-the-Pooh, still sits
at No. 1, a sad reminder of her lost
childhood, far away from the latter day metropolis
with its all night diners, movie houses,
and automats, that eat at her soul, her solitude, 
her unassuming laughter, like a cancer.

No doubt, she will do a great many strange things
again and again, like reading
The Great Gatsby, aloud to her unborn child,
dancing the Charleston, the Peabody,
the Turkey Trot, without any partner to swing
with, dine with, dream with, share in her
triumphs and tragedies, in her stifling room
in the city of strangers, strange loves, strange art,
strange affairs, but she will never sit,
stand, or otherwise pose for Edward Hopper
again, even if she lives to be
a hundred, aware or unaware of her lasting
           impression.
      
Mark A. Murphy

Mark A. Murphy was born in 1969 in the UK. His poetry publications include Tin Cat Alley (1996), Our Little Bit of Immortality (2011), Night-watch Man & Muse (2013) and his next full length collection, Night Wanderer’s Plea is pending from Waterloo Press, UK. His latest collection, To Nora, A Singer of Sad Songs is to be published this year by Clare Songbirds Publishing House in America. He is currently looking for a publisher for his collection of epigrams, Little Known Aphorisms and he is now also working on a full length collection of ekphrastic poems, Word Painting. His poems have been published in 18 countries in over 200 journals in print and online.