City Roofs 1932

A city roof down in Greenwich Village.

Hopper’s haunts. Without a single tree

or blade of grass to show, this could be

New York in any season of the year:

winter, summer, spring, the late-day sun



soaked now into those skylights and rustbrick

chimney stacks, with that orange obelisk

filling up the foreground to the right.

It’s all abstract and yet so real, just like

those tar-splayed buckled roofs you ran on

as a boy back in the Forties. In this roofscape,

though, there’s no one to be seen, no human shape,

not even someone’s shadow, as if the scene alone

revealed itself to the beholder. And now, once more,

those ghosts drift up from the caked and sunbaked tar.

And look, there’s your mother, at twenty years of age,

as she tries her best, while managing a smile, to engage

you long enough for the click of someone’s camera,

those shadows edging toward the Fifty-ninth Street

Bridge below, your toddler’s steps making their retreat.

And there you are two years later on that windy rooftop

in your army outfit, East Fifty-First your backdrop

now, as your father looks up to wave as he heads off

to war. And there’s that ziggurat rising half a mile south

they call the Chrysler, replete with its art deco motif,



your one sure beacon when you, six years old then,

walked those winter evenings down Second Avenue

back home, reliving still those flickering scenes

of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans as they yodeled on and on.

Or Autry on his horse riding those western plains.



But what are you to make of all of this? The truth

is you still don’t know, though time is running out

to find some answer. Those stoops and railings

long since turned to dust. Gone too those rows

of rooftops with their narrow alleys in between,

where you learned to jump from one tenement

to the next to escape mad Harry and his gang.

Or that roof my father told me once how the cops

flung some poor kid off when they found him

hiding behind a chimney in the shadow of the El.

Dear God, tell me how to summon up once more

that boy (long gone) in black knickers and starched

white shirt, grinning as his mother snapped

his picture that warm spring day he made his First

Communion. Oh, to feel again if only for a moment,

a moment only, a moment only, that sense

of peace you find here in Edward Hopper’s sun-

drenched rooftop, empty of everyone

except the blessed eye of the beholder, as now

that light and shadow gather here to greet you.