William E. Stafford

Today outside your prison I stand and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen; you have relatives outside. And there are thousands of ways to escape. Years ago I bent my skill to keep my cell locked, had chains smuggled to me in pies, and shouted my plans to jailers; but always new plans occured to me, or the new heavy locks bent hinges off, or some stupid jailer would forget and leave the keys. Inside, I dreamed of constellations— those feeding creatures outlined by stars, their skeletons a darkness between jewels, heroes that exist only where they are not. Thus freedom always came nibbling my thought, just as—often, in light, on the open hills— you can pass an antelope and not know and look back, and then—even before you see— there is something wrong about the grass. And then you see. That’s the way everything in the world is waiting. Now—these few more words, and then I’m gone: Tell everyone just to remember their names, and remind others, later, when we find each other. Tell the little ones to cry and then go to sleep, curled up where they can. And if any of us get lost, if any of us cannot come all the way— remember: there will come a time when all we have said and all we have hoped will be all right. There will be that form in the grass.

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. We would come at daylight and find the line sag, the fishbelly gleam and the rush on the tether: to feel the swerve and the deep current which tugged at the tree roots below the river.

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, nor even speed. His pupil, a king's son, died at an early age. That Aristotle spoke of him it is impossible to find—the youth was notorious, a conqueror, a kid with a gang, but even this Aristotle didn't ever say. Around the farthest forest and along all the bed of the sea, Aristotle studied immediate, local ways. Many of which were wrong. So he studied poetry. There, in pity and fear, he found Man. Many thinkers today, who stand low and grin, have little use for anger or power, its palace or its prison— but quite a bit for that little man with eyes like a lizard.

A telephone line goes cold; birds tread it wherever it goes. A farm back of a great plain tugs an end of the line. I call that farm every year, ringing it, listening, still; no one is home at the farm, the line gives only a hum. Some year I will ring the line on a night at last the right one, and with an eye tapered for braille from the phone on the wall I will see the tenant who waits— the last one left at the place; through the dark my braille eye will lovingly touch his face. “Hello, is Mother at home?” No one is home today. “But Father—he should be there.” No one—no one is here. “But you—are you the one . . . ?” Then the line will be gone because both ends will be home: no space, no birds, no farm. My self will be the plain, wise as winter is gray, pure as cold posts go pacing toward what I know.

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. Not so the legend under, fixed, inexorable, deep as the darkest mine the thick rocks won't tell. As fire burns the leaf and out of the green appears the vein in the center line and the legend veins under there, So, the world happens twice— once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.

Ours are the streets where Bess first met her cancer. She went to work every day past the secure houses. At her job in the library she arranged better and better flowers, and when students asked for books her hand went out to help. In the last year of her life she had to keep her friends from knowing how happy they were. She listened while they complained about food or work or the weather. And the great national events danced their grotesque, fake importance. Always Pain moved where she moved. She walked ahead; it came. She hid; it found her. No one ever served another so truly; no enemy ever meant so strong a hate. It was almost as if there was no room left for her on earth. But she remembered where joy used to live. She straightened its flowers; she did not weep when she passed its houses; and when finally she pulled into a tiny corner and slipped from pain, her hand opened again, and the streets opened, and she wished all well.

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.

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. There was just a continent without much on it under a sky that never cared less. Ready for a change, the elbows waited. The hands gripped hard on the desert.

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!”

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: Denver, Cheyenne. Hibernating in the library of the school on the hill a few pieces by Thomas Aquinas or Saint Teresa and the fragmentary explorations of people like Alfred North Whitehead crouch and wait amid research folders on energy and military recruitment posters glimpsed by the hard stars. The school bus by the door, a yellow mound, clangs open and shut as the wind finds a loose door and worries it all night, letting the hollow students count off and break up and blow away over the frozen ground.