All of my grown children and most of their families live in the Pacific Northwest, the land of my birth and where I now live myself, as I have at several other times in my life. The Pacific Coast, say from San Francisco to Seattle, feels more than any other place my home ground.
So it was with particular pleasure that I discovered this morning that one of my most admired poets, William Stafford, had been Oregon's poet laureate and that this year is the centennial year of his birth. I also like to think that he passed to me his habit of writing in the quiet early morning hours before sunrise.
I recall the final line of "Vocation," the last poem of Stafford's 1963 National Book Award-winning book, Traveling Through the Dark. "Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be."
An extension of what he called his "questing imagination," in Steve Garrison's view, "seeks to take the reader to the frontiers of his own imagination, to the edge of what he knows, and then to induce him to explore farther."
One of Stafford's students, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, wrote, “In our time there has been no poet who revived human hearts and spirits more convincingly than William Stafford. There has been no one who gave more courage to a journey with words, and silence, and an awakened life.”
One can hardly wish for better inspiration. So it seems a good day to share a few of Stafford's poems I carry with me.
A Ritual To Read To Each Other
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.
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.
A lifeline, I imagine, but not in the sense of a saving preserver at one end. More a thread whose weave precedes consciousness and remains supple, both strong and fragile, and requires conscious practice as one grows and ages. We might call it character or grace. The last line's "don't" perhaps is intended as a puzzle. "While you hold it you can’t get lost" implies you can get lost if you lose it. Letting go of the thread is thus a real possibility, holding on to it a matter of awareness, a practice of awakening. So this poem and the previous one, "A Ritual to Read to Each Other," may usefully be read together.
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The poem below stirs memories of traveling through the dark, sometimes when I had the care to swerve and think as the poet does, more often when I did not, but blundered on. Another, early memory is evoked, too: as a child driving with my parents around a mountain turn, frightened by the sudden appearance of a large antlered buck running directly at us. It was the buck who swerved. Instinct rather than thought served him—and us—well, but that moment left in my mind a memory of one disaster averted when I knew, even then, others would come.
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 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.