poem after a poem by césar vallejo w/ a nod to donald justice
A poem by Jay Hopler.
i will die in the desert on a sunny day
b/c i was born in the islands
on a rainy one
i will die in the desert this cannot be helped
maybe on a friday as today is a friday at the beginning of
a cold spring
it will be a friday b/c today friday stoned & alone i drove
into the west desert & grieved
my own passing & never so much as today do i feel
in the middle of a 2-lane road
empty for 1,000 years in both
directions
jay hopler is dead his life was as easy as it got
& he had the scars to prove it
these are the witnesses: all the fridays & the rains & the sun
& the road & every grain of sand
in that desert
Jay Hopler’s first collection of poetry, Green Squall (2006), was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize; his second collection, The Abridged History of Rainfall (2016), was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. As an editor and translator, his works include The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Murder for Hire (1998), Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (edited with his spouse, poet and Renaissance scholar Kimberly Johnson, 2013), and The Museum of Small Dark Things: 25 Poems by Georg Trakl (2016). The recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, a Whiting Award, a Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, two Florida Book Awards, and the Rome Prize in Literature, he lives with his family in Salt Lake City.
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Thumbnail image by Glenn Malone via Flickr / CC.
