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Walking West

Anyone with quiet pace who

walks a gray road in the West

may hear a badger underground where

in deep flint another time is

Caught by flint and held forever,

the quiet pace of God stopped still.

Anyone who listens walks on

time that dogs him single file,

William Stafford

Report To Crazy Horse

All the Sioux were defeated. Our clan

got poor, but a few got richer.

They fought two wars. I did not

take part. No one remembers your vision

or even your real name. Now

the children go to town and like

loud music. I married a Christian.

Crazy Horse, it is not fair

William Stafford

Humanities Lecture

Aristotle was a little man with

eyes like a lizard, and he found a streak

down the midst of things, a smooth place for his feet

much more important than the carved handles

on the coffins of the great.

He said you should put your hand out

at the time and place of need:

strength matters little, he said,

William Stafford

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

William Stafford

In The Deep Channel

Setting a trotline after sundown

if we went far enough away in the night

sometimes up out of deep water

would come a secret-headed channel cat,

Eyes that were still eyes in the rush of darkness,

flowing feelers noncommittal and black,

and hidden in the fins those rasping bone daggers,

with one spiking upward on its back.

William Stafford

Bi-Focal

Sometimes up out of this land

a legend begins to move.

Is it a coming near

of something under love?

Love is of the earth only,

the surface, a map of roads

leading wherever go miles

or little bushes nod.

William Stafford

Monuments For A Friendly Girl At A Tenth Grade Party

The only relics left are those long

spangled seconds our school clock chipped out

when you crossed the social hall

and we found each other alive,

by our glances never to accept our town's

ways, torture for advancement,

nor ever again be prisoners by choice.

Now I learn you died

William Stafford

Passing Remark

In scenery I like flat country.

In life I don’t like much to happen.

In personalities I like mild colorless people.

And in colors I prefer gray and brown.

My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains,

says, “Then why did you choose me?”

Mildly I lower my brown eyes—

there are so many things admirable people do not understand.

William Stafford

One Home

Mine was a Midwest home—you can keep your world.

Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.

We sang hymns in the house; the roof was near God.

The light bulb that hung in the pantry made a wan light,

but we could read by it the names of preserves—

outside, the buffalo grass, and the wind in the night.

A wildcat sprang at Grandpa on the Fourth of July

when he was cutting plum bushes for fuel,

William Stafford

At The Bomb Testing Site

At noon in the desert a panting lizard

waited for history, its elbows tense,

watching the curve of a particular road

as if something might happen.

It was looking at something farther off

than people could see, an important scene

acted in stone for little selves

at the flute end of consequences.

William Stafford

Accountability

Cold nights outside the taverns in Wyoming

pickups and big semis lounge idling, letting their

haunches twitch now and then in gusts of powder snow,

their owners inside for hours, forgetting as well

as they can the miles, the circling plains, the still town

that connects to nothing but cold and space and a few

stray ribbons of pavement, icy guides to nothing

but bigger towns and other taverns that glitter and wait:

William Stafford

An Oregon Message

When we first moved here, pulled

the trees in around us, curled

our backs to the wind, no one

had ever hit the moon—no one.

Now our trees are safer than the stars,

and only other people's neglect

is our precious and abiding shell,

pierced by meteors, radar, and the telephone.

William Stafford