That Light One Find In Baby Pictures-Jay Hopler

That Light One Finds In Baby Pictures


1.
Being born is a shame---

But it’s not so bad, as journeys go. It’s not the worst one
We will ever have to make. It’s almost noon

And the light now clouded in the courtyard is
Like that light one finds in baby pictures: old

And pale and hurt---

2.
When all roads are low and lead to the same
Place, we call it fate and tell ourselves how

We were born to make the journey. Who’s
To say we weren’t?

3.
The clouded light has changed to rain.
The picture---no, the baby’s blurry.

4.
That’s me, the child playing in the sand with a pail
And shovel; in the background, my mother’s shadow

Is crawling across a soot-blackened collapse of brick
And timber, what might have been a bathhouse once.

The tide is coming in. Someone has written “HELL”
On its last standing wall.


From the New Yorker March 6, 2006

Read A Combustion of Plums by Hopler at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~glafemina/poetsintheirthirties2004archive/id35.html

Jay Hopler's work has appeared most recently, or is forthcoming, in The Iowa Review, The Journal, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, The New Yorker, Pleiades and Xantippe. His book of poems, Green Squall, was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Green Squall will be published by Yale University Press in April 2006. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing/Poetry at University of South Florida.

http://www.pshares.org/authors/authordetails.cfm?prmauthorid=6515