Up before sunrise and standing in a parking lot. I looked up in the sky and saw patterns of lights. A very wide soft, shaft like a searchlight to the west, and delicate ripples of clouds to the southeast. A few seconds later I looked again. They were gone. Mirages. Probably due to the sharp and uneven lighting in the parking lot that surrounded me. Or I was just too tired.

“I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them…” William Carlos Williams

I’ve always wondered why the window on the right is blazing red in Hopper’s Night Windows, 1928. It turns out there is a lamp pressed close to the pane and the color, presumably red curtains or a painted wall, is set off by the glow. The woman, partially seen in center window leans away from the window on the left, a soft white and ultramarine blue curtain that waves in the night breeze. There is a tension between hot and cool, eroticism and purity in this oil painting that reminds me of a poem by Philip Larkin. Not so much the atmosphere but the tension between profane and sacred that the windows on right and left could represent. See Philip Larkin High Windows [warning: this poem contains graphic language]