William Stafford Quotes

Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.

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. ~ William Stafford ~

Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music

...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.

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.

They miss the whisper that runs any day in your mind, "Who are you really, wanderer?"-- and the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is: "Maybe I'm a king.

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.

There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.

Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.

A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.

Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?

The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.

I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again.

An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.

Yes It could happen any time, tornado, earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen. Or sunshine, love, salvation. It could, you know. That's why we wake and look out - no guarantees in this life. But some bonuses, like morning, like right now, like noon, like evening.

Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.

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.

I embrace emerging experience. I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.

A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.

Those who champion democracy, but make a fetish of never accepting anything they don't agree with -- what advantage do they see in democracy?

If it should happen you wake up and Armageddon has come, lie still.

When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again. - The Trouble With Reading

In every town we lived in, there was one great big door ready to open for anyone — the library. And I never met a library I didn’t like.

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.

Between roars the lion purrs.

The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing. And things you know before you hear them--those are you, Those are why you are in the world.

There may be losses too great to understand That rove after you and--faint and terrible-- rip unknown through your hand.

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 am your own way of looking at things," she said. "When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation

The earth says have a place, be what that place requires; hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other.

You are a memory too strong to leave this world...

The wars we haven't had saved many lives.

I would exchange all that I have written for the next thing.

We think it is calm here, or that our storm is the right size.

So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.

Anyone who dies by their own hand always has my sympathy. It's easy to sit in judgement on another's struggle from the outside without ever living in their suffocating darkness. If there is an explanation left behind, it usually confirms how relentlessly harsh and unfair they were on themselves. Mourn their release with mercy and gratitude for doing what they were capable of in their short lives.

Why I Am Happy Now has come, an easy time. I let it roll. There is a lake somewhere so blue and far nobody owns it. A wind comes by and a willow listens gracefully. I hear all this, every summer. I laugh and cry for every turn of the world, its terribly cold, innocent spin. That lake stays blue and free; it goes on and on. And I know where it is.

Ask Me Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made. I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.

Reluctant hero, drafted again each Fourth of July, I'll bow and remember you. Who shall we follow next? Who shall we kill next time?

I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.

Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.

Which of the horses we passed yesterday whinnied all night in my dreams? I want that one.

Poverty plus confidence equals pioneers. We never doubted.

. . . On a sandbar sunlight stretches out its limbs, or is it a sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold?

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

Politicians need citizens who will permit them to behave reasonably.

Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?

Assurance" You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow pulls across the hills and thrums, or in the silence after lightning before it says its names-and then the clouds' wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles-you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head- that's what the silence meant: you're not alone. The whole wide world pours down.

Children of heroes have glory for breakfast.

Protest poetry -- could there be consensus poetry?

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself. William Martin*

Those times you caught them out and showed them up -- they learned how stupid they are. But now you'll never hear the little song of their purring throats, and you'll never know what they think, when you say hello.

Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.

Save the world by torturing one innocent child? Which innocent child?

How far friends are! They forget you, most days. They have to, I know; but still, it’s lonely just being far and a friend. I put my hand out—this chair, this table— so near: touch, that’s how to live. Call up a friend? All right, but the phone itself is what loves you, warm on your ear, on your hand. Or, you lift a pen to write—it’s not that far person but this familiar pen that comforts. Near things: Friend, here’s my hand. — William Stafford, “Friends,” The Way It Is. (Graywolf Press, 1998)

An Afternoon in the Stacks Closing the book, I find I have left my head inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound, words adjusting themselves to their meaning. Long passages open at successive pages. An echo, continuous from the title onward, hums behind me. From in here the world looms, a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences carved out when an author traveled and a reader kept the way open. When this book ends I will pull it inside-out like a sock and throw it back in the library. But the rumor of it will haunt all that follows in my life. A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.

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. ... 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.

Stafford was late again, as he had expected he would be late. He signaled the bartender and indicated his empty glass. He burrowed a little more securely in his separate awareness, he nestled a little more deeply into his private darkness, and he waited. In the long run, he thought, that is all one does; wait for people or keep people waiting.

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

Our Story" Remind me again—together we trace our strange journey, find each other, come on laughing. Some time we’ll cross where life ends. We’ll both look back as far as forever, that first day. I’ll touch you—a new world then. Stars will move a different way. We’ll both end. We’ll both begin. Remind me again.

You Reading This, Be Ready Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts? When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life— What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

You Reading This, Be Ready Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts? When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life— Whatever can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

Next time what I'd do is look at the earth before saying anything. I'd stop just before going into a house and be an emperor for a minute and listen better to the wind or to the air being still. When anyone talked to me, whether blame or praise or just passing time, I'd watch the face, how the mouth has to work, and see any strain, any sign of what lifted the voice. And for all, I'd know more -- the earth bracing itself and soaring, the air finding every leaf and feather over forest and water, and for every person the body glowing inside the clothes like a light.

Poetry Its door opens near. It’s a shrine by the road, it’s a flower in the parking lot of The Pentagon, it says, “Look around, listen. Feel the air.” It interrupts international telephone lines with a tune. When traffic lines jam, it gets out and dances on the bridge. If great people get distracted by fame they forget this essential kind of breathing and they die inside their gold shell. When caravans cross deserts it is the secret treasure hidden under the jewels.

With Kit, Age Seven, 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.

We were traveling between a mountain and Thursday, Holding pages back on the calendar, Remembering every turn in the roadway: We hold that sky, we said, and remember. So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid. Some day like this might save the world.

Afterwards Mostly you look back and say, "Well, OK. Things might have been different, sure, and it's not too bad, but look - things happen like that, and you did what you could." You go back and pick up the pieces. There's tomorrow. There's that long bend in the river on the way home. Fluffy bursts of milkweed are floating through shafts of sunlight or disappearing where trees reach out from their deep dark roots. Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows till they learn that floating, that immensity waiting to receive whatever arrives with trust. Maybe somebody has to explore what happens when one of us wanders over near the edge and falls for awhile. Maybe it was your turn.

Glances Two people meet. The sky turns winter, quells whatever they would say. Then, a periphery glance into danger - and an avalanche already on its way. They have been honest all their lives; careful, calm, never in haste; they didn't know what it is to meet. Now they have met: the world is waste. They find they are riding an avalanche feeling at rest, all danger gone. The present looks out of their eyes; they stand calm and still on a speeding stone.

You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes.

Readers should not be loaded with more information and guidance than a lively mind needs--puzzlement can be accepted, but insulting clarity is fatal to a poem.

They say that history is going on somewhere. They say it won't stop. I have held One picture still for a long time and waited.

An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn’t hear it—I breathed it into my ears. Little

You either surrender voluntarily to Shakespeare's genius or delay the inevitable collision with that cultural colossus later.

Things you know before you hear them -- Those are you, Those are why You are in the world.

Before you have your dreams, your dreams have you, and every day pushes a night before it while the wilderness follows.

If you find it difficult to write, lower your standards.

A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over.” Shortened and often credited to Mark Twain,[*] the idea is that if we eat the frog at the beginning of the day, it will be next to impossible for the day to get any worse. A more applicable interpretation of this idea was expressed by the poet and pacifist William Stafford’s daily rule: “Do the hard things first.

William Stafford was describing (though he was talking about writing) when he wrote . . . Just as the swimmer does not have a succession of handholds hidden in the water, but instead simply sweeps that yielding medium and finds it hurrying him along, so the writer passes his attention through what is at hand, and is propelled by a medium too thin and all-pervasive for the perceptions of nonbelievers who try to stay on the bank and fathom his accomplishment.6

To do it artificially, to try to hype myself into being a better writer by doggedly reading better literature, is also a mistake. I learn to use the language by the pleasures it gives me when I am able to swim in it or maneuver in it or interchange in it with the people around me.

Today" The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays come down. A tomorrow has come. Open your hands, lift them: morning rings all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer. Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now, you could close your eyes and go on full of light. And it is already begun, the chord that will shiver glass, the song full of time bending above us. Outside, a sign: a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air, “Be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant has passed through town, widening streets, touching the ground, shouldering away the stars.

Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made. I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say. — William Stafford, “Ask Me,” Ask Me; 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford (Graywolf Press, 1998)

The Gift Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one that your life conceals, the one waiting outside when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at in her crochet design, the one almost found over at the edge of the music, after the sermon. It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given. You get killed now and then, violated in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.) You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait and pray, and maybe good things come-maybe the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more. You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness. It's a balance, the taking and passing along, the composting of where you've been and how people and weather treated you. It's a country where you already are, bringing where you have been. Time offers this gift in its millions of ways, turning the world, moving the air, calling, every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours.

Remembering" When there was air, when you could breathe any day if you liked, and if you wanted to you could run. I used to climb those hills back of town and follow a gully so my eyes were at ground level and could look out through grass as the stems bent in their tensile way, and see snow mountains follow along, the way distance goes. Now I carry those days in a tiny box wherever I go, I open the lid like this and let the light glimpse and then glance away. There is a sigh like my breath when I do this. Some days I do this again and again. William Stafford, The Darkness Around Us Is Deep (Harper Perennial; Paperback Original edition, January 12, 1994)

Plato’s term for soul-suture: “the fastening of heaven.” Rumi’s term: “the cord of causation.” Plotinus’s: “our tutelary spirit, not bound up with our nature, not the agent in our action, belonging to us as belonging to our soul, as the power which consummates the chosen life.” And American poets have discovered this magic, too! Denise Levertov speaks of a thread, finer than spider’s silk, that pulls at her, keeps her company, guides her. William Stafford speaks of a thread we can follow as it pierces things that change, yet itself never changes. That these spirit threads, as Plotinus says, aren’t ours, that they’re the soul’s own unbreakable extensions, is why they have the

Remarks on My Character Waving a flag I retreat a long way beyond any denial, all the way over the scorched earth, and come into an arching grove of evasions, onto those easy paths, one leading to another and covered ever deeper with shade: I'll never dare the sun again, that I can promise. It is time to practice the shrug: "Don't count on me." Or practice the question that drags its broken wing over the ground and leads into the swamp where vines trip anyone in a hurry, and a final dark pool waits for you to stare at yourself while shadows move closer over your shoulder. That's my natural place; I can live where the blurred faces peer back at me. I like the way they blend, and no one is ever sure itself or likely to settle in unless you scare off the others. Afraid but so deep no one can follow, I steal away there, holding my arms like a tree.

The Dream Of Now" When you wake to the dream of now from night and its other dream, you carry day out of the dark like a flame. When spring comes north and flowers unfold from earth and its even sleep, you lift summer on with your breath lest it be lost ever so deep. Your life you live by the light you find and follow it on as well as you can, carrying through darkness wherever you go your one little fire that will start again.

Waiting for God" This morning I breathed in. It had rained early and the sycamore leaves tapped a few drops that remained, while waving the air's memory back and forth over the lawn and into our open window. Then I breathed out. This deliberate day eased past the calendar and waited. Patiently the sun instructed the shadows how to move; it held them, guided their gradual defining. In the great quiet I carried my life on, in again, out again.

When I Met My Muse" I glanced at her and took my glasses off—they were still singing, They buzzed like a locust on the coffee table and then ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and knew that nails up there took a new grip on whatever they touched. “I am your own way of looking at things,” she said. “When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand

You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow pulls across the hills and thrums, or the silence after lightning before it says its names—and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles—you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head— that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone. The whole wide world pours down.

A star hit in the hills behind our house up where the grass turns brown touching the sky. Meteors have hit the world before, but this was near, and since TV; few saw, but many felt the shock. The state of California owns that land (and out from shore three miles), and any stars that come will be roped off and viewed on week days 8 to 5. A guard who took the oath of loyalty and denied any police record told me this: “If you don’t have a police record yet you could take the oath and get a job if California should be hit by another star.” “I’d promise to be loyal to California and to guard any stars that hit it,” I said, “or any place three miles out from shore, unless the star was bigger than the state—in which case, I’d be loyal to it.” But he said no exceptions were allowed, and he leaned against the state-owned meteor so calm and puffed a cork-tip cigarette that I looked down and traced with my foot in the dust and thought again and said, “OK—any star.

Any Morning Just lying on the couch and being happy. Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head. Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has so much to do in the world. People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget. When dawn flows over the hedge you can get up and act busy. Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven left lying around, can be picked up and saved. People won’t even see that you have them, they are so light and easy to hide. Later in the day you can act like the others. You can shake your head. You can frown.

How to Regain Your Soul 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.

A Walk in the Country" To walk anywhere in the world, to live now, to speak, to breathe a harmless breath: what snowflake, even, may try today so calm a life, so mild a death? Out in the country once, walking the hollow night, I felt a burden of silver come: my back had caught moonlight pouring through the trees like money. That walk was late, though. Late, I gently came into town, and a terrible thing had happened: the world, wide, unbearably bright, had leaped on me. I carried mountains. Though there was much I knew, though kind people turned away, I walked there ashamed— into that still picture to bring my fear and pain. By dawn I felt all right; my hair was covered with dew; the light was bearable; the air came still and cool. And God had come back there to carry the world again. Since then, while over the world the wind appeals events, and people contend like fools, like a stubborn tumbleweed I hold, hold where I live, and look into every face: Oh friends, where can one find a partner for the long dance over the fields?

It is all right to be simply the way you have to be, among contradictory ridges in some crescendo of knowing.

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.

In Response to a Question: ”What Does the Earth Say?” The earth says have a place, be what that place requires; hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other. (Some people call their scenery flat, their only pictures framed by what they know: I think around them rise a riches and a loss too equal for their chart - but absolutely tall.) The earth says every summer have a ranch that’s minimum: one tree, one well, a landscape that proclaims a universe - sermon of the hills, hallelujah mountain, highway guided by the way the world is tilted, reduplication of mirage, flat evening: a kind of ritual for the wavering. The earth says where you live wear the kind of color that your life is (grey shirt for me) and by listening with the same bowed head that sings draw all things into one song, join the sparrow on the lawn, and row that easy way, the rage without met by the wings within that guide you anywhere the wind blows. Listening, I think that’s what the earth says.

Climbing Along the River Willows never forget how it feels to be young Do you remember where you came from? Gravel remembers. Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean. Exactly at midnight yesterday sighs away. What I believe is, all animals have one soul. Over the land they love they crisscross forever.

Cutting Loose” Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason, you sing. For no reason, you accept the way of being lost, cutting loose from all else and electing a world where you go where you want to. Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder that a steady center is holding all else. If you listen, that sound will tell where it is, and you can slide your way past trouble. Certain twisted monsters always bar the path – but that’s when you get going best, glad to be lost, learning how real it is here on the earth, again and again.

Learning a Word While Climbing It was a clarity come upon The mountains greater than the snow, a name Pronounced among them like an opening When a traveler finds a pass and escapes a storm. While I was falling I saw such a light: saved, My nylon rope came true and swung me free, I hung above the world and saw it, never So bright again, one long glimpse- Eternity.

After Arguing Against The Contention That Art Must Come From Discontent Whispering to each handhold, “I'll be back,” I go up the cliff in the dark. One place I loosen a rock and listen a long time till it hits, faint in the gulf, but the rush of the torrent almost drowns it out, and the wind— I almost forgot the wind: it tears at your side or it waits and then buffets; you sag outward. . . . I remember they said it would be hard. I scramble by luck into a little pocket out of the wind and begin to beat on the stones with my scratched numb hands, rocking back and forth in silent laughter there in the dark— “Made it again!” Oh how I love this climb! —the whispering to stones, the drag, the weight as your muscles crack and ease on, working right. They are back there, discontent, waiting to be driven forth. I pound on the earth, riding the earth past the stars: “Made it again! Made it again!

For my young friends who are still afraid There is a country to cross you will find in the corner of your eye, in the quick slip of your foot--air far down, a snap that might have caught. And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing voice that finds its way by being afraid. That country is there, for us, carried as it is crossed. 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.

Lines to Stop Talking By In your city today outside my room Some quiet animal or only the rain At its patient task was opening the wall By touching it, and whatever was there Spread outward a bit at a time toward the horizon Cresting ahead and breaking, the way All through your life whatever is near extends When you think. In your city today I thought of Never, hiding inside An iceberg floating south rinsed by the days Till that great blind ice blinks open in the center. I heard an ambulance carry its banner away In the rain in your city. And I thought of My poems- how they are always there Waiting to try for that circumference It takes all of us to find.

Sending These Messages Over these writings I bent my head. Now you are considering them. If you Turn away I will look up: a bridge That was there will be gone. For the rest of your life I will stand here, Reaching across. If these writings can bring a turn Or an echo that touches you-maybe A face, a slant, a tune- you will stop Too and bend over them. When you Look up, your thought will reach Wherever I am. I know it is strange. And there’s no measure For this. The only connection we make Is a like a twinge when sometimes they change The beat in music, and we sprawl with it And hear another world for a minute That is almost there.

B.C. The seed that met water spoke a little name. (Great sunflowers were lording the air that day; This was before Jesus, before Rome; that other air Was readying our hundreds of years to say things That rain has beat down on over broken stones And heaped behind us in many lands.) Quiet in the earth a drop of water came, And the little seed spoke: “Sequoia is my name.

Malheur Before Dawn An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn’t hear it- I breathed it into my ears. Little ones at first, the stars retired, leaving Polished little circles on the sky for a while. Then the sun began to shout from below the horizon. Throngs of birds campaigned, their music a tent of song. From across a pond, out of the mist, One drake made a V and said its name. Some vast animal of air began to rouse From the reeds and lean outward. Frogs discovered their national anthem again. I didn’t know a ditch could hold so much joy. So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid. Some day like this might save the world.

With Neighbors One Afternoon Someone said, stirring their tea, "I would come home any time just for this, to look out the clear backyard air and then into the cup." You could see the tiniest pattern of bark on the trees and every slight angle of color change in the sunshine—millions of miles of gold light lavished on people like us. You could put out your hand and feel the rush of years rounding your life into these days of ours. From somewhere a leaf came gliding slowly down and rested on the lawn. Remember that scene?—inside it you folded the last of your jealousy and hate and all those deeds so hard to forget. Absolution: swish!—you took, the past into your mouth, And swallowed it, warm, thin, bitter and good.

The Poets’ Annual Indigence Report” Tonight beyond the determined moon, aloft with nothing left that is voluntary for delight, everything uttering hydrogen, your thinkers are mincing along through a hail of contingencies, While we all–floating though we are, lonesome though we are, lost in hydrogen–we live by seems things: when things just are, then something else will be doing the living. Doing is not enough; being is not enough; knowing is far from enough. So we clump around, putting feet on the dazzle floor, awaiting the real schedule by celebrating the dazzle schedule. And, whatever is happening, we are here; a lurch or a god has brought us together. We do our jobs–listening in fear in endless, friendless, Jesus-may-happen fashion. Our shadows ride over the grass, your shadows, ours: – Rich men, wise men, be our contemporaries.

Love in the Country We live like this: no one but some of the owls awake, and of them only near ones really awake. In the rain yesterday, puddles on the walk to the barn sounded their quick little drinks. The edge of the haymow, all soaked in moonlight, dreams out there like silver music. Are there farms like this where no one likes to live? And the sky going everywhere? While the earth breaks the soft horizon eastward, we study how to deserve what has already been given us

Any Morning’ Just lying on the couch and being happy. Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head. Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has so much to do in the world. People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget. When dawn flows over the hedge you can get up and act busy. Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven left lying around, can be picked up and saved. People won’t even see that you have them, they are so light and easy to hide. Later in the day you can act like the others. You can shake your head. You can frown.

Representing Far Places In the canoe wilderness branches wait for winter; every leaf concentrates; a drop from the paddle falls. Up through water at the dip of a falling leaf to the sky's drop of light or the smell of another star fish in the lake leap arcs of realization, hard fins prying out from the dark below. Often in society when the talk turns witty you think of that place, and can't polarize at all: it would be a kind of treason. The land fans in your head canyon by canyon; steep roads diverge. Representing far places you stand in the room, all that you know merely a weight in the weather. It is all right to be simply the way you have to be, among contradictory ridges in some crescendo of knowing.

Holding the Sky We saw a town by the track in Colorado. Cedar trees below has sifted the air, Snow water foamed the torn river there, And a lost road went climbing the slope like a ladder. We were traveling between a mountain and Thursday, Holding pages back on the calendar, Remembering every turn in the roadway: We hold that sky, we said, and remember. On the western slope we crashed into Thursday. So long, you said when the train stopped there. Snow was falling, touching in the air. Those dark mountains have never wavered.

Allegiances It is time for all the heroes to go home if they have any, time for all of us common ones to locate ourselves by the real things we live by. Far to the north, or indeed in any direction, strange mountains and creatures have always lurked– elves, goblins, trolls, and spiders:-we encounter them in dread and wonder, But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes, and we come back, changed but safe, quiet, grateful. Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills while strange beliefs whine at the traveler’s ears, we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love where we are, sturdy for common things.

Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made. I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say. — William Stafford, “Ask Me,” Ask Me; 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford (Graywolf Press, January 7th 2014)

Scars" They tell how it was, and how time came along, and how it happened again and again. They tell the slant life takes when it turns and slashes your face as a friend. Any wound is real. In church a woman lets the sun find her cheek, and we see the lesson: there are years in that book; there are sorrows a choir can't reach when they sing. Rows of children lift their faces of promise, places where the scars will be. William Stafford, Americans’ Favorite Poems edited by Maggie Dietz and Robert Pinsky (W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition, November 1, 1999)

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke the owls. Invoke winter, then spring. Let any season that wants to come here make its own call. After that sound goes away, wait. A slow bubble rises through the earth and begins to include sky, stars, all space, even the outracing, expanding thought. Come back and hear the little sound again. Suddenly this dream you are having matches everyone's dream, and the result is the world. If a different call came there wouldn't be any world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling. How you stand here is important. How you listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.

When they enter a church, they are known and marked as sailors; they attract the notice of no small part of the congregation; and most of them would sooner face the cannon’s mouth than that thoughtless, supercilious gaze.” Stafford assured his readers that, based on his many conversations with both sailors and sea captains, this undisguised distaste for American mariners was almost universal.

Always write in the wilderness.

Shakespeare's strengths and there are many include his unique ability to vastly improve pre-existing plots and turn them profoundly dark and tragic or lightly comedic and romantic at will. There is also The Bard's lyrical, complex dialogue encoded with hidden meaning that works both in context and out, his towering, unforgettable characterisations, and the variety and depth of his female characters.

The Unknowable Scribe by Stewart Stafford Behind the looking glass, Lurks the trembling hand of deception, How deep it goes. Scratching worthlessly on the glass, Yet leaving diamond shavings in its wake, To ponder over endlessly. Question not, despise not, Seek no answers here For there are none to give. The cygnet is mooncalf, To the mighty swan, Cat's paw to catchpenny. Birther to birthing, A classification of bedding, To redress the baseness of our grindings. © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.

Abandonment is a necessary task of the writer. As we grow in our art, our art changes, and we must move on. One of the most generous spirits in twentieth-century literature was William Stafford. He said the writer’s job is to abandon his or her work, to allow others to make judgment of its worth, and to go on to the next poem, the next story. All of us have habits of thought. Often for writers they include formulas of disbelief in our own gifts. If we cannot let go of the familiar old habits, we will not grow as artists. To grow as a writer, we must open our hearts, grow in our capacity to learn, and deepen our courage. There is an ancient promise: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Even those truths that are painful will ultimately increase my wisdom, undergird my strength, make possible my art.

Dandelion cavalry, light little saviors, baffle the wind, they ride so light. They surround a church and outside the window utter their deaf little cry: “If you listen well, music won’t have to happen.” After service they depart singly to mention in the world their dandelion faith: 'God is not big; He is right.

Justice is a matter of yielding to delight in human variety.

Always do your writing in the wilderness.

So to you, Friend, I confide my secret: to be a discoverer you hold close whatever you find, and after a while you decide what it is. Then, secure in where you have been, you turn to the open sea and let go.” —William Stafford, Tomorrow Will Have an Island

Do not dare to ever touch me again!" she spat at him. "Go caress your Maud, go kiss her in the roses!" A little sob tore from her throat and the stubborn tears sprang to her eyes again. He loosed her waist and took one of her hands firmly in both of his warm ones. "I am in your bad graces, sweetheart, and rightly so. I did not know you and Will stood so close in the garden." "I am certain it would not have made one tiny difference to you if the cardinal himself would have stood there watching!" His teeth shone white in the dim bower as he smiled and the rain splattered down around their protective arch of leaves. "I am elated that my attention to other ladies displeases you." "I could not care less what you do, William Stafford!" "Really? Fine, because I am going to kiss you and if we had the time, I would carry you to one of those three hundred silken beds in that great pile of Wolsey's bricks and make hot love to you whether you were willing or not. I told you I do not love the little Jennings, Mary, and I told you true. You know whom I do love, do you not, sweetheart?

All events and experiences are local, somewhere. And all human enhancements of events and experiences -- all the arts -- are regional in the sense that they derive from immediate relation to felt life. It is this immediacy that distinguishes art. And paradoxically the more local the feeling in art, the more all people can share it; for that vivid encounter with the stuff of the world is our common ground. Artists, knowing this mutual enrichment that extends everywhere, can act, and praise, and criticize, as insiders -- the means of art is the life of all people. And that life grows and improves by being shared. Hence, it is good to welcome any region you live in or come to, or think of, for that is where life happens to be, right where you are.

I Have a Witness" Sometimes a center the soul can recognize will speak from anywhere , inside a mountain, or from a whirlwind ... The world can take, the soul restores. A million wrong voices proclaim One light lives forever.

Waking At 3 a.m." 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. You think water in the river; you think slower than the tide in the grain of the wood; you become a secret storehouse that saves the country, so open and foolish and empty. You look over all that the darkness ripples across. More than has ever been found comforts you. You open your eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast and as far as your thought can run. A great snug wall goes around everything, has always been there, will always remain. It is a good world to be lost in. It comforts you. It is all right. And you sleep.

I embrace emerging experience. I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.” William Stafford

Each newcomer feels obliged to do something else, forgetting that if he himself is somebody he will necessarily do that something else," said Valéry. And Roethke told students to "write like somebody else." There are those usual people who try desperately to appear unusual and there are unusual people who try to appear usual. Most poets I've met are from the latter and much smaller group. William Stafford, at his best as good as we have, is a near-perfect example. It doesn't surprise me at all when the arrogant wild man in class turns in predictable, unimaginative poems and the straight one is doing nutty and promising work. If you are really strange you are always in enemy territory, and your constant concern is survival.

Assurance You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow pulls across the hills and thrums, or the silence after lightning before it says its names—and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles—you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head— that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone. The whole wide world pours down.

Most mornings I get away, slip out the door before light, set forth on the dim, gray road, letting my feet find a cadence that softly carries me on. Nobody is up—all alone my journey begins. Some

For generations, the Stafford men had been known throughout the ton for their appearance—the epitome of tall, dark, and handsome. Alex’s father was a mere six feet tall, and was teased relentlessly by his brothers and cousins as “the diminutive duke.” His sons did not suffer the same fate—all standing taller than six feet, four inches, proving that the next crop of Staffords would reclaim their statuesque heritage. The sons in question—William, twenty-three, Nicholas, twenty-one, and Christopher, nineteen—shared other familial qualities with their father, however: They were devilishly handsome, with the dark-as-midnight hair, strong jaws, regal noses, and full lips that had made the Staffords legendary since the early days of the kingdom. But it wasn’t their good looks that stopped women in their tracks. It was the famous Stafford eyes. For as long as anyone could remember, Stafford men had been blessed with eyes the color of clearest emeralds. One could get lost in those eyes—they were windows on emotion, glittering with humor, flashing with anger, fiery with passion. These were eyes that wreaked havoc on the women around them—unless the woman in question was a sister. In which case, they served to simply exasperate.

Living on the Plains” That winter when this thought came-how the river held still every midnight and flowed backward a minute-we studied algebra late in our room fixed up in the barn, and I would feel the curved relation, the rafters upside down, and the cows in their life holding the earth round and ready to meet itself again when morning came. At breakfast while my mother stirred the cereal she said, "You're studying too hard," and I would include her face and hands in my glance and then look past my father's gaze as he told again our great race through the stars and how the world can't keep up with our dreams.

Edward IV’s policy of ‘Regional Governance’ (1461–71): During Edward IV’s first reign, Somerset politics was still influenced by the Stourton and Hungerford affinities which may have sought the patronage of Edward’s courtier, Humphrey Stafford. He was the only son of the Beaufort-Stourton client William Stafford by Katherine Chideock, and it was because of his Chideock inheritance (principally focussed in Somerset, Dorset, and Wiltshire) that he was destined to be a leading member of the Somerset gentry. In the later 1450s, Stafford may have been associated with the earl of Wiltshire whose first wife was his cousin (pp. 192–3). The Bonville-FitzWaryn alliance had dominated Devon politics throughout the 1440s and 1450s (see Chapter 5) but on Bonville’s death in 1461, his sole heir was his infant great-granddaughter, Cecily. Naturally, a child could not provide adequate leadership to the Bonville-FitzWaryn connection. Moreover, Bonville’s allies, Lord FitzWaryn and Sir Philip Courtenay, were also both entering their sixties (both were deceased before 1470), and similarly could not provide the dynamic direction that was required. Into this leadership void, stepped Lord Stafford (p. 207). …[Humphrey, Lord] Stafford [of Southwick] became a crucial national–regional power-broker–one of the pillars upon which rested the pediment of Yorkist government (p. 210). It seems clear that Lord Stafford’s land-holding, office-holding, and clientele suggest that he acted as a political core for the south-west region. Stafford’s inheritances already made him a significant figure in Somerset and Dorset but, favoured by Edward IV, he was granted extensive lands forfeited by Lancastrians throughout the south-west, such as the estates of the earldom of Devon. In addition to his own properties, Stafford was showered with many offices in Somerset and Dorset, as well as other positions of immense significance in the region–in particular, his endowment with the most important duchy of Cornwall offices ensured that he dominated Cornwall (p. 221). It seems quite understandable to find that, as a figure of local, regional, and national importance, Lord Stafford’s associations were regional in nature: he was connected to major figures from each county… (pp. 221–2).

Some actors are too intimidated to tackle the works of Shakespeare. When, in fact, it is the treasure trove they should be seeking out. There's the depth and complexity of Shakespeare's plays, the richness of the characterisations, the poetic beauty of the language, and the darkest villains in literature to get their teeth into.

Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.

A Phantom Banquet by Stewart Stafford Forego the seminal salad, Lest it retraces your lips, As ambushing vomitus with, Greasy, peccant aftertaste. It is not willing regurgitation, For the young's sustenance, But spitting of venom, I say, Rendering venting of spleen. Savour secret ingredients, All shall emerge in the end, A reading of the entrails, And of potted plots afoul. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved

The Great Dane by Stewart Stafford Martyr father of poison sleep, Rotten carcass of a slain beast, Wicked stars cast against him, Beloved, that loved him least. O maggot of gnawing doubt, Wriggling along life’s tightrope, Sleepwalking this broken path, To a coup de grâce last stroke. The players unmask dark play, Trampling nightshade that reeks, Honour's duel in a snake pit, The shadow castle grows weak. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken. WILLIAM STAFFORD

Now I carry those days in a tiny box wherever I go. I open the lid like this and let the light glimpse and then glance away. There is a sigh like my breath when I do this. Some days I do this again and again. — William Stafford, from “Remembering,” The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems, ed. Robert Bly (HarperPerennial, 1993)

Father and son No sound - a spell- on, on out where the wind went, our kite sent back its thrill along the string that sagged but sang and said, "I'm here! I'm here!" - till broke somewhere, gone years ago, but sailed forever clear of earth. I hold-whatever tugs the other end-I hold that string.

Storm Warning Something not the wind shakes along far like a sky truck in low gear over Oregon. Like the shore wind baying along through fir but not now the wind, no, not really so, it is a new weight and force that begins to blow. This winter they'll still call it wind and let it explore; and when they talk it over next summer there by the shore, along through the scrub and salal the new something will range. In a hurry, late, it won't wait for the air. In the fall again they'll remember, each of them, back to now. They'll no longer call it wind, they'll want it all changed. They'll want it all different then, but they won't know how.

Saint Matthew and All Lorene - we thought she'd come home. But it got late, and then days. Now it has been years. Why shouldn't she, if she wanted? I would: something comes along, a sunny day, you start walking; you meet a person who says, "Follow me," and things lead on. Usually, it wouldn't happen, but sometimes the neighbors notice your car is gone, the patch of oil in the driveway, and it fades. They forget. In the Bible it happened - fishermen, Levites. They just went away and kept going. Thomas, away off in India, never came back. But Lorene- it was a stranger maybe, and he said, "Your life, I need it." And nobody else did.

Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why. If you do not have things right in your life you will be overwhelmed: you may be heroic, but you will not be wise. If you have things right in your life but do not know why, you are just lucky, and you will not move in the little ways that encourage good fortune.

Lorene—we thought she’d come home. But it got late, and then days. Now it has been years. Why shouldn’t she, if she wanted? I would: something comes along, a sunny day, you start walking; you meet a person who says, “Follow me,” and things lead on. Usually, it wouldn’t happen, but sometimes the neighbors notice your car is gone, the patch of oil in the driveway, and it fades. They forget. In the Bible it happened—fishermen, Levites. They just went away and kept going. Thomas, away off in India, never came back. But Lorene—it was a stranger maybe, and he said, “Your life, I need it.” And nobody else did.

We stood by the library. It was an August night. Priests and sisters of hundreds of unsaid creeds passed us going their separate pondered roads. We watched them cross under the corner light. Freights on the edge of town were carrying away flatcars of steel to be made into secret guns; we knew, being human, that they were enemy guns, and we were somehow vowed to poverty. No one stopped or looked long or held out a hand. They were following orders received from hour to hour, so many signals, all strange, from a foreign power: But tomorrow, you whispered, peace may flow over the land. At that corner in a flash of lightning we two stood; that glimpse we had will stare through the dark forever: on the poorest roads we would be walkers and beggars, toward some deathless meeting involving a crust of bread.

This monument is for the unknown good in our enemies. Like a picture their life began to appear: they gathered at home in the evening and sang. Above their fields they saw a new sky. A holiday came and they carried the baby to the park for a party. Sunlight surrounded them. Here we glimpse what our minds long turned away from. The great mutual blindness darkened that sunlight in the park, and the sky that was new, and the holidays. This monument says that one afternoon we stood here letting a part of our minds escape. They came back, but different. Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life. This monument is for you.

Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake loose. Let me be drowned, baptized, in the light given me. Day comes around, night, fall, winter, spring, summer. Leaves overhead, underfoot. Waves arrive, buffets from friends offended, enemies. Let it all come: this is my way, this is the canoe I’m in. "Adrift

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason, you sing. from "Cutting Loose

This is the field where the battle did not happen, where the unknown soldier did not die. This is the field where grass joined hands, where no monument stands, and the only heroic thing is the sky. Birds fly here without any sound, unfolding their wings across the open. No people killed—or were killed—on this ground hallowed by neglect and an air so tame that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

Bohemian Rhapsody has the tortured individual at its centre struggling with a dilemma involving murder and a parent—a conflict structurally similar to Hamlet’s agony in William Shakespeare's 'To be or not to be' soliloquy. That timeless and universal link confirms its power: no matter how sophisticated we become or imagine ourselves to be, we still struggle with the primal problems life throws at us. Whereas Hamlet internally debates the merits of life and death as he teeters on the tightrope between those all-or-nothing points, Freddie Mercury's protagonist sings: 'I don't want to die, I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all!