“I know I am handsome and young and drunk
eternal as a weed.”
— Frank Stanford
Do not look sadly at days gone by days below days like a river running under the stars Do not listen to the blues or speak often with priests Do not think the rich women enrolled in the college of nightfall will always smell the same way Everytime the tree works the leaves dream Everytime I carve the dead wing my name in the dark lamp of the outhouse I said everytime I cut my name in the old wood rotten as a tugboat I know I am always with you Everytime the schoolboy’s bad moon dowses blood from the virgin’s stone thighs I know I am handsome and young and drunk eternal as a weed It will not smell the same Everytime I open a bottle of wine and see a snake doctor under my bed I know there is something coming and eternal like taking off a white coat over the body of the dead Poets have done this before Poets have made love and gathered at the cheap joints they’ve cut their fingers toasting one another’s death Poets have made love and remained thick they’ve gotten cold feet at the crucial moments when left alone with the students with sad eyes Do not die in the wintertime for there is no okra or sailboats It will not smell the same that twig of blood or the chiffonier Do not listen to hunting dogs in autumn or tie yellow flies for the small lips of desperate friends Poets have done this before and they’ve wandered off alone and unheard of to bury the caul of their own stillborn Like a voice the odor has changed Dust under the hooves of a horse running side by side with the fog a book in the hands of a fool Cheese and fish and spinsters are the body of the poet for the poet does not eat black bread he gives it to the poor Everytime a mare throws a foal in an exile’s country I know I am with you a gun in the hand of a fool The poet forgets in remembrance of you he is the lunatic’s left hand man on Sundays the acolyte of the moon he is night following other nights the eyes of the blind the stranger your wife leaves with when you’re still talking with your youth stowed away on the ship of death and it will not smell the same Everytime I see a young man tuck his knife back in his vest I want to say forget it and drink
You can find this poem in Stanford’s collection — What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford.
From Longreads: Frank Stanford’s short life was a study in contradictions: his childhood was divided between the privilege of an upper-crust Memphis family and summers deep in the Mississippi Delta; he was a backwoods outsider who maintained correspondence with poets ranging from Thomas Lux to Allen Ginsberg; and posthumously, he is both little-known and a cult figure in American letters. He was a “swamprat Rimbaud,” “one of the great voices of death,” and “sensitive, death-haunted, surreal, carnal, dirt-flecked and deeply Southern.” He shot himself in 1978, just shy of his 30th birthday.
Wow. What a complicated or, better, complex poem. At the beginning:
Do not look sadly at days gone by
days below days like a river running under the stars
Do not listen to the blues
or speak often with priests
Do not think the rich women enrolled in the college of nightfall
will always smell the same way
Everytime the tree works the leaves dream
Powerful reminders of impermanence and that this life is as real as a dream.
Sometimes, we say stop holding onto things but the truth is that there is nothing to hold onto in the first place. It is all fleeting. We might even say illusory at times.
Best to be momentarily aware that the river never stops running underneath the stars, but only momentarily. You cannot hold onto that, either.
Thank you for the poem.
thanks for the introduction /
and seduction / great stuff /
a copy of the collected poems of
Frank Stanford arrives on the
midnight train tomorrow.