Would You Like To Lie Down With the Light On and Cry

Frank Stanford

My nights are like valleys
Where the night falls soon
And the mist rises early.

The work I do is not easy,
But it is not bad.

When the white barns of the afternoon
Are dark and quiet
With their wasps and snakes
I wonder why we lie to one another:

Spots on the aged
Are called little flowers of the cemetery,
On the young they are marks
Left by the teeth of beauty.

The dying
Clutch their genitals
And shake like trestles
When the locomotive of death passes by,
And lovers
Like their trains
In the trembling bridges of their beds.

When no one is looking
We touch the thin underthings
Of our death to our lips.

I remember my death
And I remember desire,
And they are not the same.

Nine months from tonight
A woman will be holding
Her belly in pain.

Ginny Stanford