In These Dark Hours

Objector

In line at lunch I cross my fork and spoon
to ward off complicity — the ordered life
our leaders have offered us. Thin as a knife,
our chance to live depends on such a sign
while others talk and the Pentagon from the
moon
is bouncing exact commands: "Forget your faith;
be ready for whatever it takes to win: we face
annihilation unless all citizens get in line."

I bow and cross my fork and spoon: somewhere
other citizens more fearfully bow
in a place terrorized by their kind of oppressive
state.
Our signs both mean, "You hostages over there
will never be slaughtered by my act." Our vows
cross: never to kill and call it fate.

§

This blog was born in a coffee house in Kansas and it seems only right to visit, from time to time, one or another Kansan poet. As peace is a thing for which we should all, when we know it, be truly thankful, and as today is a day when Kansans and other Americans engage -- or try to engage, or should try to engage -- fully with thanks, I'm starting with William Stafford, who was a pacifist. (Yes, Virginia, Kansas has pacifists. This one's dead, but there are some living, as well.)

Stafford's poems reflect not only politics, but also the prairie and the towns he loved.

Prairie Town

There was a river under First and Main,
the salt mines honeycombed farther down.
A wealth of sun and wind ever so strong
converged on that home town, long gone.

At the north edge there were the sand hills.
I used to stare for hours at prairie dogs,
which had their town, and folded their little
paws
to stare beyond their fence where I was.

River rolling in secret, salt mines with care
holding your crystals and stillness, north prairie
what kind of trip can I make, with what old friend,
ever to find a town so widely rich again?

Pioneers, for whom history was walking through
dead grass,
I and the main things that happened were miles
and the time of day-
you built that town, and I have let it pass.
Little folded paws, judge me: I came away.


Level Light

Sometimes the light when evening fails
stains all haystacked country and hills,
runs the cornrows and clasps the barn
with that kind of color escaped from corn
that brings to autumn the winter word —
a level shaft that tells the world:

It is too late now for earlier ways;
now there are only some other ways,
and only one way to find them — fail.

In one stride night then takes the hill.


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.

§

Stafford was, in the best sense, a romantic. Remember that a novel is also called a romance. William Stafford was a man who could tell a tale.

A Story That Could Be True

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by —
you wonder at their calm.

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.'

§

Stafford's poems show their author's desire to live his life fully -- not in an indulgent, but in a spiritual and depth-of-emotion sense. He wanted of himself nothing less than complete honesty. He recognised and loved humanity, and knew how easy it was for past scars to affect present acts and responses.

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 to recognise 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.


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.


For My Young Friends Who Are 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.

§

There is a taste of Rumi, wakeful as springtime, in 'A Ritual to Read to Each Other'. Rumi's muse was to be worshipped and adored. Stafford's was both earthy and powerful.

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.

§

Lastly, because this is (after all) midnight's anchorage:


How These Words Happened

In winter, in the dark hours, when others
were asleep, I found these words and put them
together by their appetites and respect for
each other. In stillness, they jostled. They traded
meanings while pretending to have only one.

Monstrous alliances never dreamed of before
began. Sometimes they lost. Never again
do they separate in this world They are
together. They have a fidelity that no
purpose of pretense can ever break.

And all of this happens like magic to the words
in those dark hours when others sleep.