Frank Stanford > Quotes

“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”
― Frank Stanford

“Baby one night somebody
Going to strike a match on a tombstone
And read your name.”
― Frank Stanford, Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives

“tonight the gars on trees are swords in the hands of knights
the stars are like twenty-seven dancing russians and the wind
is”
― Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

“I dream and it is
another life.”
― Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

“-I have dreamed of escape, a forever

-to burn your suicide notes she read in Braille

-and the stars of dawn's trousseau”
― Frank Stanford

“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)”
― Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

“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.”
― Frank Stanford, You: Poems

“It wasn't a dream it was a flood”
― Frank Stanford

“The Minnow

If I press
on its head,
the eyes
will come out
like stars.
The ripples
it makes
can move
the moon.”
― Frank Stanford, The Singing Knives

“Amaranth"

There are no starfish in the sky tonight,
But there is one below your belly,
And there are cold evenings in your eyes.

If I could get to your house
I would look under the bed of your childhood,
The tongueless loafer without laces or eyes,
The cave of your young foot
With its odor of moon, its dampness
Coming from underground, your shoe
Which also bled and is now an island.

You have to remember these are the memories
Of a survivor, you have to remember.

You could be looking for clay to haul away,
Fill for the deep washouts of your love.
All your old loves, they bled to death, too.

Your hair is like a cemetery full of hands,
Fingers in the moonlight.

When you come down to the heart
Bring your post-hole diggers and crowbar.
Do not set a corner, a fence won’t last.
Do not bury our first child there,
Or set a post,
Although I have tasted blood on the lips of a stranger,
At night and in the rain.”
― Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

“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.”
― Frank Stanford, You: Poems

“I dream and it is another life”
― Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

“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”
― Frank Stanford, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

“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”
― Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

“Soon I will make my appearance
But first I must take off my rings
And swords and lay them out all
Along the lupine banks of the forbidden river
In reckoning the days I have
Left on this earth I will use
No fingers”
― Frank Stanford, The Singing Knives

“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”
― Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

“[L]ook at all those silver dollars a lying out there in that mud hole he said / them are mussels shining in the moonlight I said / boy when you going to learn about that moon why it ain’t no such a thing / like a cargo that shifts from one side to the other in a ghost ship / that is how my dreams change their course / I have nothing to do with it — Frank Stanford, lines 4980-85, from The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (Lost Roads Publishers, 2000)”
― Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You