catalog of the exhibition

It's glossy and good looking with information

about what I’ve already seen up close and personal,

like the refrigerator’s post-it note still in place

long after the shopping spree.

but if the catalog of the exhibition is shown to the grandkids

as a demonstration of: “I was there”–– to them it would

amount to an intrusion into their already crowded activities. but

that Edward Hopper retrospective

at the Whitney was something.

while observing the painting of a construction site

I overheard a woman say to the other woman:

“is it con-struction or de-struction”?

a startling line I would come to remember and use

in a poem written some sixty years after the event.

(the poem is titled "smart ass" a sort-of snapshot having to do with

the workings of my brain and nothing to do with Edward Hopper)

but the line, "is it con-struction or de-struction" as memorable as it was,

was not reproduced in the Edward Hopper “Catalog of the Exhibition”.