Cotton You Lose in the Field by Frank Stanford

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend April 8, 2015   Cotton You Lose in the Field   Frank Stanford

Some bad whiskey I drink by myself just like you when this wind blows as it does in the delta where a lost hearing aid can be taken for a grub worm when the black constellations make you swim backwards in circles of blood stableboys ruin their hands for a while and a man none of us can do without breaks his neck jumping over some hill chasing the fox of a half-pint and a fine-blooded horse is put out of its misery even the young sisters of the boys we run with we would give our fingers to touch them again but this war seeps back into us little insecticide and the white cricket of those days drags itself off the hook there are no more fish there is no more bait the rivers are formed by the tears of sports fans we try to pour a trail of salt as if making a long fuse with a gunpowder keg we try to swim away from the gym like slugs with gills the girls from the other school step off the bus the clouds are weighed in at the gin there is a pattern to all this like a weave of a skirt we all go crazy from looking            Frank Stanford, "Cotton You Lose in the Field," from WHAT ABOUT THIS: COLLECTED POEMS OF FRANK STANFORD. Copyright © 2015 by Ginny Crouch Stanford and C. D. Wright, Estate of Frank Stanford. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press.   Frank Stanford was born in Richton, Mississippi, on August 1, 1948. This month marks the publication of What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), bringing together many of Stanford’s out-of-print books and a selection of his ephemera. He died on June 3, 1978.   Photo credit: Ginny C. Stanford Poetry by Stanford   What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) C. D. Wright on Frank Stanford "Hellish Night" by Arthur Rimbaud "To You" by Walt Whitman Read This Poem   For National Poetry Month, we’ve teamed up with 826 National to produce Read This Poem, a celebration of poets in cities with 826 chapters. Read this week's featured poems by poets from Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038