Well, this will explain it.
It's called History.
There was a poet, another poet, who meant a great deal to me
and a lot of people my age when we were
in college, Frank Stanford.
And he was sort of already a mythic figure.
And I got a chance to meet his friend, C. D Wright.
I'm sure you heard that name.
A magnificent poet.
And she was involved with him, and they had a press together.
And Frank was an orphan.
I don't know him, and I just know that we loved his poetry.
He not only wrote the only real epic
poem called The Battlefield Where the Moon Says
I Love You that I'm aware of.
And it's supposed to be impossible, but he did it.
And it's really good.
And it's thousands of lines long.
It's terrifying.
And he was a prodigy when he was about 17.
I don't know if it's ever been published.
I saw it once.
Tom [INAUDBILE] my friend, became corresponded with him,
and Frank would send him copies of his manuscripts.
And there was one long one called
St. Francis and The Wolf.
I don't know if that's been published.
They're still fighting over his--
there are a lot of unreleased--
I know a lot of it has been finally released.
Anyway, this explains itself.
Carolyn and I corresponded after his death
for a couple of years.
She was a bit older than me, but we sort of had a rapport.
My father died.
And I was living in Ohio.
He died in New York.
And I went out to San Francisco where
she was living and working at the San Francisco State Poetry
Center.
And she was living in Haight-Ashbury.
San Francisco is very familiar to me
because I partly grew up there as a little boy.
And they hadn't been there for a long time.
So I went out there and we spent the summer hanging out.
And we had a good time, but we were a little bit too much
alike.
But anyway, I'll read.
History.
I own it.
It's all true.
Every single thing is literally true.
I own a black shirt that used to belong to Frank Stanford.
Rather, it was given me to care for once.
I had this honor.
Oh, let me tell you what I was thinking.
He was also a master of the simile
almost like Lorca or somebody.
Our favorite was, "The wind blows
through the trees like a woman on a raft."
[CHUCKLES]
I think that's one of my--
to me, that's my favorite simile.
[LAUGHTER]
I own a black shirt that used to belong to Frank Stanford.
Rather, it was given to me.
He took his own life at 30.
That's the point right--
In the house where Carolyn lived while she was there.
It took him three tries, but he did it.
How do you do that, I don't know.
That's the story, and it's supposed to--
He came in to write her a note goodbye, which he did.
And I saw the note.
It was quite long, and it ended with the sentence,
"Somehow, I will still know you."
I own a black shirt that used to belong to Frank Stanford.
Rather, it was given me to care for.
I had this honor.
It was presented to me in San Francisco in June of 1980,
three months after my father's death in New York City.
Earlier that day, I had gone on a long walk
in hopes of locating the Douglas Elementary School, where I had
attended fourth grade in 1961.
Not long, that is, after, my father left home and back
in Minneapolis for reasons which remain unclear to me.
Finally, I turned a certain corner and there it was,
my school.
However, the street on which it stood,
the neighborhood itself had all grown so much smaller.
It would have made sense, I can recall thinking,
if they had gotten larger.
So great was my own deterioration.
As I climbed the last block, I nearly
stumbled over the body of an enormous and very pale-colored
owl.
Its wings spread there on the sidewalk,
eerily perfect in every respect.
Its eyes closed as though it were sleeping.
I should say parenthetically that I hold no one to blame
if they refuse to believe this.
I had a lot of trouble believing it myself,
in spite of the horror.
I was wearing Frank's shirt at the time, of course.
A poet should always be wearing some black, he once said.
According to the friend who had given it to me,
there are three worlds, Basho wrote in a journal
he kept during one of his numerous journeys.
We know them as the three words, present, future, and past.
And now, from here, it almost looks
like I was standing for a minute at the age of 27 in all three
of them at once.
Anyway, that I stood there is surely a fact beyond dispute,
even if it is one only briefly recorded somewhere
in the infinite pages of the history of unnoticed events,
even if I can't even imagine being 27.
The shirt has grown too small for me.
It is like the shirt of a good child.
I keep it in a special drawer, folded formally like a flag.
And I've always done so in the many different places
I have lived in over the years, the years I would then
have referred to as the future.
It helps me when I take it out sometimes.
At this point, my opinion is that a poet
should carry death's imminence with him at all times the way
a priest might his black book of extremely tiny psalms.