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scrapofpaper"Love in August"
White moths
against the screen
in August darkness.
Some clamor
in envy.
Some spread large
as two hands
of a thief
who wants to put
back in your cupboard
the long-taken silver.
--Jane Hirshfield
"Silent Dialogue"
You want to be free of so many things,
yourself for one. And the heavy vigas.
You want to be free of the driving wind,
the empty canvas, the wilting strawberry plants.
I don't know how to walk here, among the ruins.
I trip on the rough-edged stones. It's too dry;
I want to water everything without asking.
The wind blows hard, delivering a whisper of father.
A silent, invisible yoke. You dream of morphine.
Another addiction, directing you to another sort of death.
But you say in the dream, I have you and I don't want to die.
Light against stone. The silence of a clenched muscle.
Some days I think I want to get married.
It's a matter of linguistics; I want to say husband.
By the Rio Chiquito, Catanya told me lobsters mate for life.
I thought of how many halves of couples I'd eaten.
I'm sorry; I was hungry. When we woke this morning,
we spoke without words of the wide, green field in the distance.
It was before the alarm went off, after the shrill of coyote.
Quick lightning split Pedernal.
It was more than the curve of your bent elbow, more
than the words we said that kept us together, more
than that particular intersection. We saw the fragile
leaf of the unflowering pansy and felt afraid.
A song is building inside the lining of our throats.
--Renée Gregorio
"History Display"
Think of those generals at the wax museum,
and the women not present, but they're somewhere,
and all the histories those people escaped by being
in the one they were in. For an instant their wars
didn't happen and a heavy sweetness comes in the air,
like flowers without any cemetery, like my sister
holding her doll up to the window before
anyone told us about the rest of the world.
Those great people can stay where they are.
With love I erase our house and bend over our town
till the streets go dim and the courthouse begins
to dissolve quietly into its lilac hedge.
Some things are made out of rock, but some
don't have to be hard. They can hold it all still,
past and future at once, now, here.
--William Stafford
"Grace Abounding"
Air crowds into my cell so considerately
that the jailer forgets this kind of gift
and thinks I'm alone. Such unnoticed largesse
smuggled by day floods over me,
or here comes grass, turns in the road,
a branch or stone significantly strewn
where it wouldn't need to be.
Such times abide for a pilgrim, who all through
a story or a life may live in grace, that blind
benevolent side of even the fiercest world,
and might--even in oppression or neglect--
not care if it's friend or enemy, caught up
in a dance where no one feels need or fear:
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.
--William Stafford
"Men"
After a war come the memorials--
tanks, cutlasses, men with cigars.
If women are there they adore
and are saved, shielding their children.
For a long time people rehearse
just how it happened, and you have to learn
how important all that armament was--
and it really could happen again.
So the women and children can wait, whatever
their importance might have been, and they
come to stand around the memorials
and listen some more and be grateful, and smell the cigars.
Then, if your side has won, they explain
how the system works and if you just let it
go on it will prevail everywhere.
And they establish foundations and give
some of the money back.
--William Stafford
"Notice What This Poem Is Not Doing"
The light along the hills in the morning
comes down slowly, naming the trees
white, then coasting the ground for stones to nominate.
Notice what this poem is not doing.
A house, a house, a barn, the old
quarry, where the river shrugs--
how much of this place is yours?
Notice what this poem is not doing.
Every person gone has taken a stone
to hold, and catch the sun. The carving
says, "Not here, but called away."
Notice what this poem is not doing.
The sun, the earth, the sky, all wait.
The crows and redbirds talk. The light
along the hills has come, has found you.
Notice what this poem has not done.
--William Stafford
"Not Very Loud"
Now is the time of the moths that come
in the evening. They are around, just being
there, at windows and doors. They crowd
the lights, planing in from dark fields
and liking it in town. They accept each other
as they fly or crawl. How do they know
what is coming? Their furred flight,
softer than down, announces a quiet
approach under whatever is loud.
What are moths good for? Maybe they offer
something we need, a fluttering
near the edges of our sight, and they may carry
whatever is needed for us to watch
all through those long nights in our still,
vacant houses, if there is another war.
--William Stafford
"Burning a Book"
Protecting each other, right in the center
a few pages glow a long time.
The cover goes first, then outer leaves
curling away, then spine and a scattering.
Truth, brittle and faint, burns easily,
its fire as hot as the fire lies make--
flame doesn't care. You can usually find
a few charred words in the ashes.
And some books ought to burn, trying for character
but just faking it. More disturbing
than book ashes are whole libraries that no one
got around to writing--desolate
towns, miles of unthought-in cities,
and the terrorized countryside where wild dogs
own anything that moves. If a book
isn't written, no one needs to burn it--
ignorance can dance in the absence of fire.
So I've burned books. And there are many
I haven't even written, and nobody has.
--William Stafford
"Waiting in Line"
You the very old, I have come
to the edge of your country and looked across,
how your eyes warily look into mine
when we pass, how you hesitate when
we approach a door. Sometimes
I understand how steep your hills
are, and your way of seeing the madness
around you, the careless waste of the calendar,
the rush of people on buses. I have
studied how you carry packages,
balancing them better, giving them attention.
I have glimpsed from within the gray-eyed look
at those who push, and occasionally even I
can achieve your beautiful bleak perspective
on the loud, the inattentive, shoving boors
jostling past you toward their doom.
With you, from the pavement I have watched
the nation of the young, like jungle birds
that scream as they pass, or gyrate on playgrounds,
their frenzied bodies jittering with the disease
of youth. Knowledge can cure them. But
not all at once. It will take time.
There have been evenings when the light
has turned everything silver, and like you
I have stopped at a corner and suddenly
staggered with the grace of it all: to have
inherited all this, or even the bereavement
of it and finally being cheated!--the chance
to stand on a corner and tell it goodby!
Every day, every evening, every
abject step or stumble has become heroic:--
You others, we the very old have a country.
A passport costs everything there is.
--William Stafford
"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.
--William Stafford
"Run before Dawn"
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 days it's escape: the city is burning
behind me, cars have stalled in their tracks,
and everybody is fleeing like me but some other direction.
My stride is for life, a far place.
Other days it is hunting: maybe some game will cross
my path and my stride will follow for hours, matching
all turns. My breathing has caught the right beat
for endurance; familiar trancelike scenes glide by.
And sometimes it's a dream of motion, streetlights coming near,
passing, shadows that lean before me, lengthened
then fading, and a sound from a tree: a soul, or an owl.
These journeys are quiet. They mark my days with adventure
too precious for anyone else to share, little gems
of darkness, the world going by, and my breath, and the road.
--William Stafford
"The Way I Write"
In the mornings I lie partly propped up
the way Thomas Jefferson did when he slept
at Monticello. Then I stop and
look away like Emily Dickinson when
she was thinking about the carriage and the fly.
When someone disturbs me I come back
like Pascal from those infinite spaces,
but I don't have his great reassurances
of math following along with me; so somehow
the world around me is even scarier.
Besides, the world on fire of Saint Teresa
surrounds me, and the wild faces Dante
awakened on his descent through those dark
forbidden caverns. But over my roof bends
my own kind sky and the mouse-nibble sound of now.
The sky has waited a long time
for this day. Trees have reached out,
the river has scrambled to get where it is.
And here I bring my little mind
to the edge of the ocean and let it think.
My head lolls to one side as thoughts
pour onto the page, important
additions but immediately obsolete, like waves.
The ocean and I have many pebbles
to find and wash off and roll into shape.
"What happens to all these rocks?" "They
become sand." "And then?" My hand stops.
Thomas Jefferson, Emily Dickinson,
Pascal, Dante--they all pause too.
The sky waits. I lean forward and write.
--William Stafford
"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.
--William Stafford
"The Trouble with Reading"
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,
and the meaning has to go find an author again.
But when we read, it's just print--deciphering,
like frost on a window: we learn the meaning
but lose what the frost is, and all that world
pressed so desperately behind.
So some time let's discover how the ink
feels, to be clutching all that eternity onto
page after page. But maybe it is better not
to know; ignorance, that wide country,
rewards you just to accept it. You plunge;
it holds you. And you have become a rich darkness.
--William Stafford
"Consolations"
"The broken part heals even stronger than the rest,"
they say. But that takes awhile.
And, "Hurry up," the whole world says.
They tap their feet. And it still hurts on rainy
afternoons when the same absent sun
gives no sign it will ever come back.
"What difference in a hundred years?"
The barn where Agnes hanged her child
will fall by then, and the scrawled words
erase themselves on the floor where rats' feet
run. Boards curl up. Whole new trees
drink what the river brings. Things die.
"No good thing is easy." They told us that,
while we dug our fingers into the stones
and looked beseechingly into their eyes.
They say the hurt is good for you. It makes
what comes later a gift all the more
precious in your bleeding hands.
--William Stafford
"Vita"
God guided my hand
and it wrote,
"Forget my name."
World, please note--
a life went by, just
a life, no claims,
A stutter in the millions
of stars that pass,
a voice that lulled--
A glance
and a world
and a hand.
--William Stafford
" 'Tell me a story,' the bearded man sitting on my living-room sofa commands. The situation, I must say, is anything but pleasant. I'm someone who writes stories, not someone who tells them. And even that isn't something I do on demand. The last time anyone asked me to tell him a story, it was my son. That was a year ago. I told him something about a fairy and a ferret--I don't even remember what exactly--and within two minutes he was fast asleep. But the situation is fundamentally different. Because my son doesn't have a beard, or a pistol. Because my son asked for the story nicely, and this man is simply trying to rob me of it.
"I try to explain to the bearded man that if he puts his pistol away it will only work in his favor, in our favor. It's hard to think up a story with the barrel of a loaded pistol pointed at your head. But the guy insists. 'In this country,' he explains, 'if you want something, you have to use force.' He just got here from Sweden, and in Sweden it's completely different. Over there, if you want something, you ask politely, and most of the time you get it. But not in the stifling, muggy Middle East. All it takes is one week in this place to figure out how things work--or rather, how things don't work. The Palestinians asked for a state, nicely. Did they get one? The hell they did. So they switched to blowing up kids on buses, and people started listening. The settlers wanted a dialogue. Did anyone pick up on it? No way. So they started getting physical, pouring hot oil on the border patrolmen, and suddenly they had an audience. In this country, might makes right, and it doesn't matter if it's about politics, or economics, or a parking space. Brute force is the only language we understand."
--Etgar Keret, "Suddenly, a Knock on the Door"
White moths
against the screen
in August darkness.
Some clamor
in envy.
Some spread large
as two hands
of a thief
who wants to put
back in your cupboard
the long-taken silver.
--Jane Hirshfield
"Silent Dialogue"
You want to be free of so many things,
yourself for one. And the heavy vigas.
You want to be free of the driving wind,
the empty canvas, the wilting strawberry plants.
I don't know how to walk here, among the ruins.
I trip on the rough-edged stones. It's too dry;
I want to water everything without asking.
The wind blows hard, delivering a whisper of father.
A silent, invisible yoke. You dream of morphine.
Another addiction, directing you to another sort of death.
But you say in the dream, I have you and I don't want to die.
Light against stone. The silence of a clenched muscle.
Some days I think I want to get married.
It's a matter of linguistics; I want to say husband.
By the Rio Chiquito, Catanya told me lobsters mate for life.
I thought of how many halves of couples I'd eaten.
I'm sorry; I was hungry. When we woke this morning,
we spoke without words of the wide, green field in the distance.
It was before the alarm went off, after the shrill of coyote.
Quick lightning split Pedernal.
It was more than the curve of your bent elbow, more
than the words we said that kept us together, more
than that particular intersection. We saw the fragile
leaf of the unflowering pansy and felt afraid.
A song is building inside the lining of our throats.
--Renée Gregorio
"History Display"
Think of those generals at the wax museum,
and the women not present, but they're somewhere,
and all the histories those people escaped by being
in the one they were in. For an instant their wars
didn't happen and a heavy sweetness comes in the air,
like flowers without any cemetery, like my sister
holding her doll up to the window before
anyone told us about the rest of the world.
Those great people can stay where they are.
With love I erase our house and bend over our town
till the streets go dim and the courthouse begins
to dissolve quietly into its lilac hedge.
Some things are made out of rock, but some
don't have to be hard. They can hold it all still,
past and future at once, now, here.
--William Stafford
"Grace Abounding"
Air crowds into my cell so considerately
that the jailer forgets this kind of gift
and thinks I'm alone. Such unnoticed largesse
smuggled by day floods over me,
or here comes grass, turns in the road,
a branch or stone significantly strewn
where it wouldn't need to be.
Such times abide for a pilgrim, who all through
a story or a life may live in grace, that blind
benevolent side of even the fiercest world,
and might--even in oppression or neglect--
not care if it's friend or enemy, caught up
in a dance where no one feels need or fear:
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.
--William Stafford
"Men"
After a war come the memorials--
tanks, cutlasses, men with cigars.
If women are there they adore
and are saved, shielding their children.
For a long time people rehearse
just how it happened, and you have to learn
how important all that armament was--
and it really could happen again.
So the women and children can wait, whatever
their importance might have been, and they
come to stand around the memorials
and listen some more and be grateful, and smell the cigars.
Then, if your side has won, they explain
how the system works and if you just let it
go on it will prevail everywhere.
And they establish foundations and give
some of the money back.
--William Stafford
"Notice What This Poem Is Not Doing"
The light along the hills in the morning
comes down slowly, naming the trees
white, then coasting the ground for stones to nominate.
Notice what this poem is not doing.
A house, a house, a barn, the old
quarry, where the river shrugs--
how much of this place is yours?
Notice what this poem is not doing.
Every person gone has taken a stone
to hold, and catch the sun. The carving
says, "Not here, but called away."
Notice what this poem is not doing.
The sun, the earth, the sky, all wait.
The crows and redbirds talk. The light
along the hills has come, has found you.
Notice what this poem has not done.
--William Stafford
"Not Very Loud"
Now is the time of the moths that come
in the evening. They are around, just being
there, at windows and doors. They crowd
the lights, planing in from dark fields
and liking it in town. They accept each other
as they fly or crawl. How do they know
what is coming? Their furred flight,
softer than down, announces a quiet
approach under whatever is loud.
What are moths good for? Maybe they offer
something we need, a fluttering
near the edges of our sight, and they may carry
whatever is needed for us to watch
all through those long nights in our still,
vacant houses, if there is another war.
--William Stafford
"Burning a Book"
Protecting each other, right in the center
a few pages glow a long time.
The cover goes first, then outer leaves
curling away, then spine and a scattering.
Truth, brittle and faint, burns easily,
its fire as hot as the fire lies make--
flame doesn't care. You can usually find
a few charred words in the ashes.
And some books ought to burn, trying for character
but just faking it. More disturbing
than book ashes are whole libraries that no one
got around to writing--desolate
towns, miles of unthought-in cities,
and the terrorized countryside where wild dogs
own anything that moves. If a book
isn't written, no one needs to burn it--
ignorance can dance in the absence of fire.
So I've burned books. And there are many
I haven't even written, and nobody has.
--William Stafford
"Waiting in Line"
You the very old, I have come
to the edge of your country and looked across,
how your eyes warily look into mine
when we pass, how you hesitate when
we approach a door. Sometimes
I understand how steep your hills
are, and your way of seeing the madness
around you, the careless waste of the calendar,
the rush of people on buses. I have
studied how you carry packages,
balancing them better, giving them attention.
I have glimpsed from within the gray-eyed look
at those who push, and occasionally even I
can achieve your beautiful bleak perspective
on the loud, the inattentive, shoving boors
jostling past you toward their doom.
With you, from the pavement I have watched
the nation of the young, like jungle birds
that scream as they pass, or gyrate on playgrounds,
their frenzied bodies jittering with the disease
of youth. Knowledge can cure them. But
not all at once. It will take time.
There have been evenings when the light
has turned everything silver, and like you
I have stopped at a corner and suddenly
staggered with the grace of it all: to have
inherited all this, or even the bereavement
of it and finally being cheated!--the chance
to stand on a corner and tell it goodby!
Every day, every evening, every
abject step or stumble has become heroic:--
You others, we the very old have a country.
A passport costs everything there is.
--William Stafford
"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.
--William Stafford
"Run before Dawn"
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 days it's escape: the city is burning
behind me, cars have stalled in their tracks,
and everybody is fleeing like me but some other direction.
My stride is for life, a far place.
Other days it is hunting: maybe some game will cross
my path and my stride will follow for hours, matching
all turns. My breathing has caught the right beat
for endurance; familiar trancelike scenes glide by.
And sometimes it's a dream of motion, streetlights coming near,
passing, shadows that lean before me, lengthened
then fading, and a sound from a tree: a soul, or an owl.
These journeys are quiet. They mark my days with adventure
too precious for anyone else to share, little gems
of darkness, the world going by, and my breath, and the road.
--William Stafford
"The Way I Write"
In the mornings I lie partly propped up
the way Thomas Jefferson did when he slept
at Monticello. Then I stop and
look away like Emily Dickinson when
she was thinking about the carriage and the fly.
When someone disturbs me I come back
like Pascal from those infinite spaces,
but I don't have his great reassurances
of math following along with me; so somehow
the world around me is even scarier.
Besides, the world on fire of Saint Teresa
surrounds me, and the wild faces Dante
awakened on his descent through those dark
forbidden caverns. But over my roof bends
my own kind sky and the mouse-nibble sound of now.
The sky has waited a long time
for this day. Trees have reached out,
the river has scrambled to get where it is.
And here I bring my little mind
to the edge of the ocean and let it think.
My head lolls to one side as thoughts
pour onto the page, important
additions but immediately obsolete, like waves.
The ocean and I have many pebbles
to find and wash off and roll into shape.
"What happens to all these rocks?" "They
become sand." "And then?" My hand stops.
Thomas Jefferson, Emily Dickinson,
Pascal, Dante--they all pause too.
The sky waits. I lean forward and write.
--William Stafford
"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.
--William Stafford
"The Trouble with Reading"
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,
and the meaning has to go find an author again.
But when we read, it's just print--deciphering,
like frost on a window: we learn the meaning
but lose what the frost is, and all that world
pressed so desperately behind.
So some time let's discover how the ink
feels, to be clutching all that eternity onto
page after page. But maybe it is better not
to know; ignorance, that wide country,
rewards you just to accept it. You plunge;
it holds you. And you have become a rich darkness.
--William Stafford
"Consolations"
"The broken part heals even stronger than the rest,"
they say. But that takes awhile.
And, "Hurry up," the whole world says.
They tap their feet. And it still hurts on rainy
afternoons when the same absent sun
gives no sign it will ever come back.
"What difference in a hundred years?"
The barn where Agnes hanged her child
will fall by then, and the scrawled words
erase themselves on the floor where rats' feet
run. Boards curl up. Whole new trees
drink what the river brings. Things die.
"No good thing is easy." They told us that,
while we dug our fingers into the stones
and looked beseechingly into their eyes.
They say the hurt is good for you. It makes
what comes later a gift all the more
precious in your bleeding hands.
--William Stafford
"Vita"
God guided my hand
and it wrote,
"Forget my name."
World, please note--
a life went by, just
a life, no claims,
A stutter in the millions
of stars that pass,
a voice that lulled--
A glance
and a world
and a hand.
--William Stafford
" 'Tell me a story,' the bearded man sitting on my living-room sofa commands. The situation, I must say, is anything but pleasant. I'm someone who writes stories, not someone who tells them. And even that isn't something I do on demand. The last time anyone asked me to tell him a story, it was my son. That was a year ago. I told him something about a fairy and a ferret--I don't even remember what exactly--and within two minutes he was fast asleep. But the situation is fundamentally different. Because my son doesn't have a beard, or a pistol. Because my son asked for the story nicely, and this man is simply trying to rob me of it.
"I try to explain to the bearded man that if he puts his pistol away it will only work in his favor, in our favor. It's hard to think up a story with the barrel of a loaded pistol pointed at your head. But the guy insists. 'In this country,' he explains, 'if you want something, you have to use force.' He just got here from Sweden, and in Sweden it's completely different. Over there, if you want something, you ask politely, and most of the time you get it. But not in the stifling, muggy Middle East. All it takes is one week in this place to figure out how things work--or rather, how things don't work. The Palestinians asked for a state, nicely. Did they get one? The hell they did. So they switched to blowing up kids on buses, and people started listening. The settlers wanted a dialogue. Did anyone pick up on it? No way. So they started getting physical, pouring hot oil on the border patrolmen, and suddenly they had an audience. In this country, might makes right, and it doesn't matter if it's about politics, or economics, or a parking space. Brute force is the only language we understand."
--Etgar Keret, "Suddenly, a Knock on the Door"
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