"Over in Montana" by William Stafford

"Winter Peregrine" by Nicholas Oberling

Winter stops by for a visit each year.

Dead leaves cluster around. They know what is

coming. They listen to some silent song.

At a bend in the Missouri, up where

it’s clear, teal and mallards lower

their wings and come gliding in.

A cottonwood grove gets ready. Limbs

reach out. They touch and shiver.

These nights are going to get cold.

Stars will sharpen and glitter. They make

their strange signs in a rigid pattern

above hollow trees and burrows and houses—

The great story weaves closer and closer, millions of

touches, wide spaces lying out in the open,

huddles of brush and grass, all the little lives.

"Over in Montana" by William Stafford from Even In Quiet Places. © Confluence Press, 1996.

"A Ritual To Read To Each Other" by William Stafford

"Fireflies" by Ito Sozan, 1926

If you don’t know the kind of person I am

and I don’t know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,

but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider--

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

"A Ritual To Read To Each Other" by William Stafford from Stories That Could Be True. © Harper & Row, 1982. 

"Watching Sandhill Cranes" by William Stafford

Spirits among us have departed--friends,

relatives, neighbors: we can't find them.

If we search and call, the sky merely waits.

Then some day here come the cranes

planing in from cloud or mist--sharp,

lonely spears, awkwardly graceful.

They reach for the land; they stalk

the ploughed fields, not letting us near,

not quite our own, not quite the world's.

People go by and pull over to watch. They

peer and point and wonder. It is because

these travelers, these far wanderers,

plane down and yearn in a reaching

flight. They extend our life,

piercing through space to reappear

quietly, undeniably, where we are.

"Watching Sandhill Cranes" by William Stafford, from Even In Quiet Places. © Confluence Press, 1996.

"How to Regain Your Soul" by William Stafford

"Children of the Mountain" by Thomas Moran, 1867

Come down Canyon Creek trail on a summer afternoon

that one place where the valley floor opens out. You will see

the white butterflies. Because of the way shadows

come off those vertical rocks in the west, there are

shafts of sunlight hitting the river and a deep

long purple gorge straight ahead. Put down your pack.

Above, air sighs the pines. It was this way

when Rome was clanging, when Troy was being built,

when campfires lighted caves. The white butterflies dance

by the thousands in the still sunshine. Suddenly, anything

could happen to you. Your soul pulls toward the canyon

and then shines back through the white wings to be you

again.

"How to Regain Your Soul" by William Stafford from The Darkness Around Us is Deep.

© Harper Perennial, 1994.

Happy Birthday, William Stafford

January 17 was the birthday of poet William Stafford. I like this guy. His life had some commonality with my own, and our family histories overlapped some as well. I was privileged to meet him twice in my life, and he has long been a mentor to me through the values expressed and upheld in his poetry and writing.

The Writer's Almanac noted his birthday:

Today is the birthday of poet William Edgar Stafford (books by this author), born in Hutchinson, Kansas (1914). Among his best-known books are The Rescued Year (1966), Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems (1977), Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation (1978), and An Oregon Message (1987).

During the Second World War, he was a conscientious objector. He refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army. From 1940 to 1944, he was interned as a pacifist in civilian public service camps in Arkansas and California where he fought fires and built roads. He wrote about the experience in the 94-page prose memoir Down In My Heart (1947), which opens with the question, "When are men dangerous?"

And you can find an excellent biography by the Poetry Foundation HERE.

Stafford was a Kansas boy who found a home in the West. I was excited to learn a few years ago after moving to Washington State that he had written a poem cycle called the Methow River Poems. The Methow is a beautiful river that runs not too far from here, and Stafford's poems, seven in all, are printed on porcelain plaques set in locations along Cascades Highway 20, which parallels the river.

These are their names and locations:
1) Time for Serenity, Anyone? --where the Methow River meets the Columbia
2) From the Wild People --between the towns of Methow and Carlton
3) Ask Me --north of the ranger station in Winthrop
4) Is This Feeling About the West Real? --also north of the ranger station in Winthrop
5) Where We Are --near the suspension footbridge, south of Mazama
6) Silver Star --in front of Silver Star mountain
7) A Valley Like This --at the scenic overlook in Washington's pass.

And here is No. 5.

The Methow River, near No. 5

WHERE WE ARE

by William Stafford

Fog in the morning here

will make some of the world far away

and the near only a hint. But rain

will feel its blind progress along the valley,

tapping to convert one boulder at a time

into a glistening fact. Daylight will

love what came.

Whatever fits will be welcome, whatever

steps back in the fog will disappear

and hardly exist. You hear the river

saying a prayer for all that’s gone.

Far over the valley there is an island

for everything left; and our own island

will drift there too, unless we hold on,

unless we tap like this: “Friend,

are you there? Will you touch when

you pass, like the rain?”

I also enjoyed this account called On the Stafford Trail by Janet and Edward Granger-Happ.

Here are a couple more of my favorite Stafford poems. Thanks, Bill. And Happy Birthday.

JUST THINKING

by William Stafford

Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.

No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held

for awhile. Some dove somewhere.

Been on probation most of my life. And

the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments

count for a lot--peace, you know.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,

bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one

stirring, no plans. Just being there.

This is what the whole thing is about. 

__________________________

TRAVELING THROUGH THE DARK

by William Stafford

Traveling through the dark I found a deer

dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.

It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:

that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car

and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;

she had stiffened already, almost cold.

I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--

her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,

alive, still, never to be born.

Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;

under the hood purred the steady engine.

I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;

around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,

then pushed her over the edge into the river.

"Vocation" by William Stafford

Oregon Trail Ruts National Historic Landmark, Wyoming

This dream the world is having about itself

includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon Trail,

a groove in the grass my father showed us all

one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell

something better about to happen.

I dreamed the trace to the mountains, over the hills,

and there a girl who belonged wherever she was.

But then my mother called us back to the car:

she was afraid; she always blamed the place,

the time, anything my father planned.

Now both of my parents, the long line through the plain,

the meadowlarks, the sky, the world's whole dream

remain, and I hear him say while I stand between the two,

helpless, both of them a part of me:

"Your job is to find what the world is trying to be."

"Vocation" by William Stafford, from The Way It Is. © Graywolf Press, 1998. 

"Father's Voice," by William Stafford

"No need to get home early;
the car can see in the dark."
       He wanted me to be rich
       the only way we could,
       easy with what we had.

And always that was his gift,
given for me ever since,
       easy gift, a wind
       that keeps on blowing for flowers
       or birds wherever I look.

World, I am your slow guest,
one of the common things
       that move in the sun and have
       close, reliable friends
       in the earth, in the air, in the rock.

"Father's Voice" by William Stafford, from Allegiances. © Harper & Row, 1970.