O, Sadness Immaculate
The women in Rome are so beautiful
It's like being beaten to death in slow motion
Looking at them—; it's like bleeding.
So I don't look at them.
I look at the parakeets nesting in the blood
Orange trees, the moon rising behind some ancient
something-or-other, the first few stars.
From my window, I can see the house
Where Galileo invented the telescope.
I wonder what he was thinking
That night, that night he first searched
Heaven. I wonder what it was
He was trying not to see.
Jay Hopler
Jay Hopler was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He earned a BA from New York University, an MA from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD from Purdue University. His first collection of poetry, Green Squall (Yale University Press, 2006), won the 2005 Yale Younger Poets Prize,a National “Best Books” Award from USA Book News, a Florida Book Award, and a Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award. His second collection, The Abridged History of Rainfall (McSweeney's, 2016), was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award in Poetry.
Hopler began to write his third collection of poems, Still Life (McSweeney's, 2022), after he was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. The collection was published two months before his death. In his evocative and elegiac poems, Hopler engaged the philosophical lyric tradition of Wallace Stevens and often drew on the tropical landscapes of Florida.
Hopler edited The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Murder for Hire (Overlook Books, 1998). With his wife, poet and Renaissance scholar Kimberly Johnson, Hopler coedited Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale University Press, 2013).His translation project,The Museum of Small Dark Things: 25 Poems by Georg Trakl, was released in 2016. He received numerous honors and awards, including a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Hopler was director of the creative writing program at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
