Thirty-four pages later, the speaker in "Envying the Art of the Cartographer" tells how "One more time, I am away from home, driving by // on a two-lane blacktop as a line of daylight again / tightens along the horizon before tipping to twilight." This poem appears about halfway through the book, and its speaker also tells us, "I often must edit the world before me," something we are reminded of toward the end of the volume in what is in many ways the strangest of the poems, "Summer Evening: Truro, 1947."
The title refers to a painting by Edward Hopper, of a couple standing on the porch of a cottage in Truro, Mass., where the Hoppers had a summer home. Hopper would also seem to be the speaker - though what he says could easily be said by the speaker in all of the other poems:
"Sometimes, I never consider putting figures in
until I actually start painting . . .
I'd prefer to leave them out."
He remembers "an earlier August night in Nyack . . . and how those lovers I thought I saw embracing / on a neighbor's lawn remain, // somewhat vaguely in my faulty recall . . . "
Since he "must mix imagination // with any of my memories," he decides:
. . . I will fill this spare
setting the way I often have before: the couple
are now outside a closed door
and caught in another conversation that cannot
be heard by anyone else . . .
He goes on to describe the scene strictly in terms of line and light and shadow, then notes:
After all is done, some may say
the young woman in this painting appears unhappy
or reluctant and the young man
seems to be offering an explanation or attempting
persuasion, that these two represent
tension and express discontent we've all experienced.
