This month’s Versed in Florida is with poet Jay Hopler. He’s been published in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, the New Yorker and SLATE. And he’s written three books of poems. He has degrees from Purdue, Johns Hopkins, NYU and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. And as Associate Professor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa, he tells WGCU’s Amy Tardif, he passes on his craft.
The Coast Road
On nights like these, when the house is too quiet, I walk into the moonlit yard and listen—.
The wind in the oak tree says: nothing ever happens when you want it to.
The crickets in the witch grass say: there will never be an end
To this droning of the surf, no end to this drowning
Of the surfer.
The tired tread of traffic in the distance.
It’s not what one listens to that matters,
But what one listens for—.
From the rafters of the back porch, the remnants of a vespiary are hanging,
Its gray walls stripped thin by poison
And last night’s
Rain.
A bird takes flight. The moon ignites. The evening weeps
Its traffic lights—
Isn’t there a bird, somewhere, whose call sounds like I’m Sorry, I’m Sorry?
What silence is there deep enough
To follow a cry like that?