Quotes from Frank Stanford

I don't believe in tame poetry. . . . Poetry busts guts.

because none of you know what you want follow me because I'm not going anywhere I'll just bleed so the stars can have something dark to shine in look at my legs I am the Nijinsky of dreams

tonight the gars on trees are swords in the hands of knights the stars are like twenty-seven dancing russians and the wind is

Baby one night somebody Going to strike a match on a tombstone And read your name.

I have dreamed of escape, a forever -to burn your suicide notes she read in Braille -and the stars of dawn's trousseau

Dreamt by a Man in a Field I am thinking of the dead Who are still with us. They are not like us, they are Young and beautiful, On their way in the rain To meet their lovers. On their way with their dark umbrellas, Always laughing, so quick, Like limbs flying back In a boat before night, So constant, Like the glass floats The fisherman use in Japan. But for them there is no moon, For us the same news We do not receive.

Weariness of Men My grandmother said when she was young The grass was so wild and high You couldn't see a man on horseback. In the fields she made out Three barns, Dark and blown down from the weather Like her husbands. She remembers them in the dark, Cursing the beasts, And how they would leave the bed In the morning, The dead grass of their eyes Stacked against her.

It wasn't a dream it was a flood

my life I love it in the dark under the water of my shadow music my form and substance lonely and blue as ever — Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (Lost Roads Publishers, 2000)

I dream and it is another life

The Minnow If I press on its head, the eyes will come out like stars. The ripples it makes can move the moon.

I saw the black seam of your stocking Running down the side of the mountain like a creek I put the whiskey down and listened from "Blue Yodel of the Desperado

There Is the Effect of Moonlight very poetic and the first time he used the telephone he yelled the reason being so he said because my friend is so very far away and if you think I'm going to tell you what else I saw you're crazy as hell

before men could speak they enjoyed confounding another with signs they enjoyed this as much as a mirror enjoys an image as much as the evening like a ship enjoys a sapphire grave

No one knows how to love anybody's trouble.