More by William Stafford

Some of you really liked that William Stafford poem I posted last week. Here are a few more. Stafford taught English and Creative Writing in Portland, Oregan until his death in 1993. He woke up at three every morning for the sole purpose of writing at least one poem. The last poem printed here is fairly well-known (and infamous); if you've read a Stafford poem before, it's probably that one.

*

YOU AND ART
Your exact errors make a music
that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.

Year after year fits over your face—
when there was youth, your talent
was youth;
later, you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;

and you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.

*

WHERE WE ARE
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?"

*

THE WAY IT IS
There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

*

WITH KIT, AGE 7, AT THE BEACH
We would climb the highest dune,
from there to gaze and come down:
the ocean was performing;
we contributed our climb.

Waves leapfrogged and came
straight out of the storm.
What should our gaze mean?
Kit waited for me to decide.

Standing on such a hill,
what would you tell your child?
That was an absolute vista.
Those waves raced far, and cold.

"How far could you swim, Daddy,
in such a storm?"
"As far as was needed," I said,
and as I talked, I swam.

*

NOTE
straw, feathers, dust—
little things

but if they all go one way,
that's the way the wind goes.

*

DIFFERENT THINGS
1
Steel hardly known what a hint is, but for the thistledown
all you have to do is breathe. And a patch of new cement
will remember a touch forever.

2
One time I asked Agnes to dance. How she
put up her arms—I thought of that this morning
fifty years later.

3
Salmon return out of a wide ocean
and find their home river all the way back
through the bitter current.

4
Under sequoias, tiny blue flowers, dim
all day and almost invisible, grow out of moss.
They reach deep into night for that color.

*

TRAVELING THROUGH THE DARK
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 head, 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.