Richard’s new book is called Night Train to Memphis, born out of a sense that life runs in big circles. Having, he says, been eager to shake the dust of Memphis from his feet as a young man, he found himself returning to it, literally and spiritually, now that he’s “old,” as he puts it..
“The Greek-Alexandrian poet Cavafy elevated his native city, Alexandria, as his model for how he became who he was as a poet; in River Town, I’m attempting to do the same.”
Richard previously wrote this beautiful poem for us.
River Town
My city came with its own tangle of meanings,
bars and backseats where I
lost my innocence avidly,
gardenias, pure intoxication
when worn by the girl I was in love with.
Real and mythical at once,
noisy and demotic
or “quiet and pure as a peach”
as Adam Zagajewski said,
writing of someplace I’ve never been.
Memphis was all of that to me—
a river town with a name strangely Egyptian
but with pool halls and Masonic temples Alexandria
could never have imagined.
Cotilions and columned
Taras built on cotton and bondage,
hacked out of a wilderness primeval and Mississippian
with axes and ruthlessness
and labor off the slave ship.
A gypsy woman on Beale Street
told your fortune for twenty-five cents,
two boys under a sweetgum tree
played mumbledy-peg with a pocket knife
while a dog looks on.
That gypsy woman, that pocket
knife, statues in the park,
the weeds growing up through cracks in the concrete,
percussion of a basketball on city sidewalks.
In the breeze, hickory smoke and pig.
Listen to Phineas Newborn playing the Memphis Blues.
That’s what I’m talking about—
the walk, the weary of it, and then
like church bells from blocks away,
a voice rises up singing.
While someone stood over an ironing board
pressing starch into a shirt
and someone had his head under the hood
of a V8 Ford
and someone else was checking a patient’s blood pressure
or selling a piece of real estate,
someone else a few streets away
was composing a melody,
brushing one color next to another,
putting words together to see what they might mean.
I was one of those, I still am.