John Hoppenthaler

Poetry Reading

Tuesday, February 26, 2008
4 p.m., Willard Smith Library
Vaughan Literature Building

John Hoppenthaler is the author of two books of poetry, Lives of Water (2003) and Anticipate the Coming Reservoir (2008). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Southern Review, and other magazines, and in several anthologies. A reviewer, essayist, and interviewer, he is editor of the literary journal Kestrel. Hoppenthaler served for several years as personal assistant to the novelist Toni Morrison. A regular faculty member at the West Virginia Writers Workshop and Writers at the Beach, he is assistant professor of English at East Carolina University.

John Hoppenthaler

BENEATH THE PEACH TREE

I put the blood-flecked vireo

into a hole and tuck the stone

of a peach into the soft down

under her ruffled wing.

I found her by accident,

sprawled under the closed window,

amid feathers, the distended wing,

the glazed eye staring so strangely.

Who knows anything about heaven?

Last night the quarter moon was a gold setting

holding the gray disk of itself like a pearl.

In my garden, slugs and beetles do exactly as they do.

Drunken jays gather at rotting peaches.

Crazy bees lift and spiral towards the sun,

and daybreak birds coo and murmur softly in the shadows.