Nighthawks, by Ray Hudson

Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper (USA) 1942

Nighthawks

I was going to explain why I’m repelled by children 
who have been taught to say all the right things 
about Edward Hopper’s night café—some paintings 
need to be earned and this is one of them— but here, 
instead, are three stanzas about Iceland.
 
It is shimmering and fresh and yes. Trout leap 
in the lakes. They are stippled and as hard as ice. 
The summer is hinged and cracked. It fills
postcards with blue lupine, purple and invasive.
Beside the sea and the volcano, a door opens 
 
and I am only steps away from where a woman 
in a red dress is waiting for something. It is late. 
The café is about to close. The man beside her 
has looked at his watch. The light, triangular 
and green, has spilled into the street. It will never 
 
be entirely dark. On the coast of Iceland, 
it will never be entirely the way it was. Root out 
the lupine and something equally glorious will arrive 
to take its place. Let the bell of the indigenous 
bluebell clang. Let women never look back. 

Ray Hudson

While most of my writing deals with Alaska history and ethnography, poetry is my first love. Moments Rightly Placed: An Aleutian Memoir was followed by a couple of histories & ethnographies and then a YA novel, Ivory and Paper: Adventures In and Out of Time, appeared from somewhere. I’m now at work on a book about Unangan grass basketry. I live in Vermont.