Going Places — Blackbird Archive

← v15n2, Fall 2016

I was spending a lot of time in Georgetown those days & sleeping

in Howie’s upstairs guest room

Hanging out along M street where I kept getting mistaken

for Patrick Dewaere

Since Get Out Your Handkerchiefs was playing just up the street

& I didn’t get it until I saw Dewaere

In a picture from Le Monde wearing glasses identical to mine & who

wouldn’t want to be him

In those good days before the world closed in all around him & some

suicides hit you exactly

At the umbilical knothole pretty much untying everything you thought

you’d cinched up tight

In your valiant late 20s when everybody who was anybody promised

that you were really going places

place memory mortality friendship

David St. John

David St. John is the author of twelve poetry collections, including The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems (forthcoming from Ecco Press, 2017), The Window (Arctos Press, 2014), and The Auroras (HarperCollins, 2012). He edited The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016), a posthumous collection by the poet Larry Levis, and co-edited American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (W.W. Norton & Company, 2009) with the poet Cole Swensen. He has been awarded both the Rome Prize Fellowship and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the O.B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry from The Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation, along with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is university professor and chair of English and comparative literature at The University of Southern California. Photo by Stephanie Diani