Blackbird Archive
← v15n2, Fall 2016
Poetry · Volume 15, Number 2

The Darkroom

David St. John

In negative both body & sand graduate only slightly any pure black

they’ve recovered from the light

Revealing as the prints emerge in their basin once again the way

a simple swirl of flesh

Across the grained vanilla of the beach allows for sensual waves

rising & falling breaking

Free of my own misunderstanding of the day & your own as well

& because light’s a most complex companion

& the most fluent & most amused by touching only what it wishes

to expose

Obscuring anything it’s chosen to refuse or grown bored by just

slipping off into its own shadow left opaque

& pale as those expectant ghosts in the dregs of my espresso cup

tossed out nonchalantly into the wet street

By a waiter watching us walk away from this café into an evening

of sudden dark curtains & a platinum spring rain

artlovememoryplace
David St. John

David St. John is the author of twelve poetry collections, including The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems (forthcoming from Ecco Press, 2017), The Window (Arctos Press, 2014), and The Auroras (HarperCollins, 2012). He edited The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016), a posthumous collection by the poet Larry Levis, and co-edited American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (W.W. Norton & Company, 2009) with the poet Cole Swensen. He has been awarded both the Rome Prize Fellowship and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the O.B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry from The Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation, along with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is university professor and chair of English and comparative literature at The University of Southern California. Photo by Stephanie Diani