I Think We Should Keep Some of This

There is a man I never met who often brings me comfort in these anxious times. He is someone who awoke at 3 a.m. every morning for fifty years to write in his journal, creating 22,000 poems in the course of his lifetime and publishing 65 volumes of poetry and prose. He was a conscientious objector who worked in civilian public service camps during World War II. He later taught at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, traveling extensively to read his poems and teach his craft to others. His name was William Stafford.

I once mentioned to the writer Gretel Ehrlich that I had a special affection for William Stafford and over time had come to think of him as my friend. It turned out that she had actually known him, and that many years ago they had led some sort of writing and poetry sessions together in towns and classrooms in the remote rural West. She recalled that they were scheduled one evening to convene a group at the library in a particularly lonely outpost someplace, and not a soul showed up.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“We write,” replied Stafford.

And they sat at a table and wrote.

I love that story, and I hope I’m remembering it accurately, but it seems consistent with the man I imagine Stafford to have been. James Dickey, who perhaps met him also, described his natural mode of speech as ‘a gentle, mystical, half-mocking and highly personal daydreaming about the western United States’. Somehow that resonates with me, and the landscape is familiar.

Is “This Feeling About the West Real?" Stafford asks in the title of one of his poems, and then answers:

All their lives out here some people know

they live in a hemisphere beyond what Columbus discovered.

These people look out and wonder: Is it magic? Is it the oceans of the Pacific?

You can't walk through it without wrapping a new

piece of time around you, a readiness for a meadow lark,

that brinkmanship a dawn can carry for lucky people

all through the day.

But if you don't get it, this bonus, you can

go home full of denial, and live out your years.

Great waves can pass unnoticed outside your door;

stars can pound silently on the roof: your teakettle

and cosy life inside can deny everything outside-whole mountain ranges,

history, the holocaust, sainthood, Crazy Horse.

Listen - something else hovers out here, not color, not outlines or depth

when air relieves distance by hazing far mountains,

but some total feeling or other world

almost coming forward, like when a bell sounds

and then leaves a whole countryside waiting.

It wasn't my intention to type out that entire poem, but it's awfully hard to chop these up and amputate choice bits for display. I'll try to be more restrained for the remainder of this post lest it turn into a miniature William Stafford anthology. In any case, I did not discover Stafford until I myself lived Out West, and I have come to associate him with this geography in the same way I connect Wallace Stegner to it.

And yet Stafford speaks clearly in any context. He is an observant and understanding soul who quietly tells me what I didn't even know I needed to hear.

When I am afraid, he is honest with me:

What you fear will not go away: it will take you into 
yourself and bless you and keep you.


That's the world, and we all live there.

But he reminds me to hold on to truth and navigate with integrity:

There is a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change.

and

Nothing you can do can stop time’s unfolding. You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Like me, he lives with his share of old grief; it bows in its corner and hides in the dark, but it’s there. And yet he knows, too that despite the hollow of pain:

Things That Hurt Me -Turn into pearls. First my tongue turns them over and over. They have an edge that lacerates and then brings out a coating. They begin to shine.

If I'm discouraged over rejection and disapproval, my friend gives me a nudge and a wink and asks:

When they criticize you how do you hold your wings? I hold mine out and down, descend a little, then more. Cool air comes. Nobody cares how low I descend, and the way my eyes close makes me disappear. They have their sky again.

And when I struggle with insomnia in the hour of the wolf, he reminds me:

Even in the cave of the night when you wake and are free and lonely, neglected by others, discarded, loved only by what doesn’t matter – even in that big room no one can see, you push with your eyes till forever comes in its twisted figure eight and lies down in your head.

He has high expectations of me:

How you stand here is important. How you listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

And he urges me to get up and pay attention:

Don’t just stay tangled up in your life. Out there in some river or cave where you could have been, some absolute lonely dawn may arrive and begin the story that means what everything is about....don’t just look, either:let your whole self drift like a breath and learn its way down through the trees…

I realize I am at risk of going overboard here. I love too many of these poems. Allow me just a few more excerpts, please, and if you want to wade in further on your own, I suggest you start with the slender volume called Even In Quiet Places.

So, before I go -- do you know how an unexpected kindness, even a smile from a stranger, can save you sometimes? In "Grace Abounds" Stafford speaks of this, and of the redemptive powers of the natural world, be it molecules of air or the branch of a tree. In the final verse, he writes:

I’m saved in this big world by unforeseen friends, or times when only a glance from a passenger beside me, or just the tired branch of a willow inclining toward earth, may teach me how to join earth and sky.

His words rinse and renew and remind me what matters, how every morning dawns with new possibility and every evening brings "an arch and promise renewed. Nobody has to notice..."

For those who do notice, wonders abound. Listen:

Water likes to sing. If you leave it alone, even in quiet places, it'll talk a little to itself about old days it has known and the songs it composed.

It's such a beautiful thought. For Stafford, every look at the world -- and every attentive listening -- could be a kind of salvation. Everything is waiting for our breathing respect. In his understated way, he muses,

I think we should keep some of this, in case God comes back to see what we did with it.

And in this time of global crisis, that feels more urgent than ever.

Now the stars are pounding silently on my roof and the creek is singing its way through the canyon and the ink still speaks from the pages of books and somewhere in the deep is a light like faith.

From far a light, maybe a hill ranch remote and unvisited, beams on the horizon when we pass; then it is gone.

For the rest of our lives that far place waits; it’s an increment, one more hollow that slips by out there, almost a gift, an acquaintance taken away.

Still, beyond all ranches the deep night waits, breathing when we breathe, always ready to offer new light, over and over, so long as we search for something so faint most people won’t know, even when it is found.