take to the tracks —
when the whistle blows,
hop the train;
first line out,
destinations unknown.
in the sidecar pocket,
find fast friends alone;
bend rounded,
the mountain curves moan.
drop of sleep,
smashing distant light
of a golden spike;
drives me vanishing,
point to point to point to gone.
In Edward Hopper’s painting Railroad Sunset, a signal tower stands starkly against undulating green hills and the spectacular colors of sunset. Since his childhood, Hopper had been fascinated by trains, and after his marriage to Josephine Nivison Hopper, the couple embarked on their first transcontinental train trip, travelling to Colorado and New Mexico. The year that he painted this scene, Hopper and his wife travelled from New York to Charleston, South Carolina, as well as to Massachusetts and Maine. But rather than depicting the places they visited, Hopper here presents the lonely landscape in between, with the railroad tracks slicing through the countryside parallel to the picture plane—as if glimpsed from the window of a passing train. As was his frequent practice, Hopper painted the scene once he had returned to his New York studio, creating an image that is not an exact record of a specific place, but instead fuses his memories with imaginary details.
https://whitney.org/collection/works/5874