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ASK ME
First draft of “Ask Me,” December 11, 1974 (reduced).
From the William Stafford Archives.
Also by William Stafford
POETRY
Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford 1937–1947
The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems
Even in Quiet Places
My Name Is William Tell
Passwords
An Oregon Message
Smoke’s Way
A Glass Face in the Rain
Stories That Could Be True
Someday, Maybe
Allegiances
The Rescued Year
Traveling through the Dark
West of Your City
PROSE
Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War
Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer’s Vocation
The Answers Are inside the Mountains: Meditations on the Writing Life
You Must Revise Your Life
Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation
Down in My Heart: Peace Witness in War Time
ASK ME
100 Essential Poems
WILLIAM STAFFORD
Edited by Kim Stafford
Graywolf Press
Compilation copyright © 2014 by the Estate of William Stafford
Introduction copyright © 2014 by Kim Stafford
Poems included in this volume were previously published in The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 199
and Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford 1937–1947 (Graywolf Press, 2008).
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operatin
Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from t
National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Signi cant support has also been provided b
Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, an
individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-664-4
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-325-4
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2014
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013946920
Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design
Cover photo: Robert B. Miller
Contents
Preface by Kim Stafford
A Story That Could Be True
Fifteen
Vocation
Ask Me
The Way It Is
A Message from the Wanderer
Traveling through the Dark
Mein Kampf
You Reading This, Be Ready
Security
Thinking for Berky
Why I Am Happy
A Ritual to Read to Each Other
Serving with Gideon
Easter Morning
Assurance
Our Story
The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune
A Gesture toward an Unfound Renaissance
Saint Matthew and All
A Dedication
Learning
Objector
At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border
For the Unknown Enemy
At the Bomb Testing Site
These Mornings
Distractions
Watching the Jet Planes Dive
Poetry
The Star in the Hills
Peace Walk
Explaining the Big One
Entering History
“Shall we have that singing…”
In the Night Desert
The Concealment: Ishi, the Last Wild Indian
Bess
American Gothic
Report to Crazy Horse
For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid
Listening
Clash
Our Kind
Aunt Mabel
At the Grave of My Brother: Bomber Pilot
A Catechism
Circle of Breath
A Memorial: Son Bret
A Family Turn
Ruby Was Her Name
With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach
Passing Remark
Once in the 40s
One Home
Prairie Town
Ceremony
The Farm on the Great Plains
One Evening
In the Oregon Country
At the Klamath Berry Festival
Looking for Gold
An Oregon Message
Earth Dweller
Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron
The Fish Counter at Bonneville
Witness
Bi-Focal
Across Kansas
Malheur before Dawn
Starting with Little Things
Mr. Conscience
The Well Rising
Climbing along the River
Roll Call
Things I Learned Last Week
Ode to Garlic
Reading with Little Sister: A Recollection
Just Thinking
Any Morning
First Grade
Freedom
When I Met My Muse
You and Art
The Animal That Drank Up Sound
Keeping a Journal
Indian Caves in the Dry Country
Burning a Book
Growing Up
A Farewell, Age Ten
Artist, Come Home
An Archival Print
Why I Am a Poet
Run before Dawn
The Last Class
Looking across the River
Father and Son
Choosing a Dog
“Are you Mr. William Stafford?”
Smoke
Preface
William Sta ord was born in 1914, the rst year of the Great War. As a child, he hear
drums in the military parade. At the edge of town, he watched the Klan march. He choppe
weeds in the sugar beet eld. He worked in an oil re nery. His paper route sustained th
family for a time. And when he started writing during World War II, in a camp fo
conscientious objectors, he wrote about trees, and evening, and quiet at the margins. H
wrote about the citizens of Dresden. He was spared the need to hate. Something deeper wa
at stake.
A hungry reader of philosophy, his lifelong companions were Nietzsche, Kierkegaard
Pascal, and Wittgenstein. But so were the thousands who sent him their poems, and receive
an immediate reply. “Let’s talk recklessly,” he would say. He wrote rituals, notes, list
gestures, letters, poems—and invited others into those spaces. “I must be willingly fallible
he wrote, “to deserve a place in the realm where miracles happen.”
At a reading, he would hold up his left hand, starting into a poem: “This is the hand
dipped in the Missouri.…” Or if he found himself in another country, he would name th
local river. In the poem that gives this book its title, he wrote, “What the river says, that
what I say.” He read these poems in Iran under the Shah, in Poland, Egypt, Pakistan, Indi
Nepal.
With his habit of writing every day before dawn, he composed twenty thousand poems. O
these, four thousand were published in magazines. He had a cardboard box in his o c
labeled “Abandoned Poems.” When I reached in a few days after my father died to take on
at random, it was startling, imperfect, exploratory. I remembered his claim, “I would trad
everything I have ever written for the next thing.”
He traveled for poetry—sometimes thirty readings in thirty days. He was an ambassado
for the possibility of peace through poetry. The calendar was black with engagements. At
reading, following one of his deft, quiet o erings, a listener helplessly spoke aloud, “I coul
have written that.” And William Sta ord, looking kindly at the speaker, replied, “But yo
didn’t.” A beat of silence. “But you could write your own.”
You could write your own. What a democratic idea. Each of us could write our own poem
our own proposal for peace, our own aphoristic meditation at the un-national monument, ou
own consolation, manifesto, blessing. “The eld of writing will never be crowded,” he tol
me once, “not because people can’t write, but they don’t think they can.” His life as teache
and witness and corresponding friend advocated the pen in hand, the moving pen, “your ow
way of looking at things.”
A hundred years after his birth, from the fty books he published in his lifetime and th
dozen published since, Ask Me o ers these one hundred essential poems of William Sta ord
from the indelible scene described in “Traveling through the Dark” to the challengin
questions presented in “You Reading This, Be Ready.”
This book will help us all be ready. “The greatest ownership of all,” he said, “is to loo
around and understand.” For us, poem by poem, he looked at the world—and the world wa
mysterious, dark, enticing.
Kim Staffor
ASK ME
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.”
Fifteen
South of the bridge on Seventeenth
I found back of the willows one summer
day a motorcycle with engine running
as it lay on its side, ticking over
slowly in the high grass. I was fifteen.
I admired all that pulsing gleam, the
shiny flanks, the demure headlights
fringed where it lay; I led it gently
to the road and stood with that
companion, ready and friendly. I was fifteen.
We could find the end of a road, meet
the sky on out Seventeenth. I thought about
hills, and patting the handle got back a
confident opinion. On the bridge we indulged
a forward feeling, a tremble. I was fifteen.
Thinking, back farther in the grass I found
the owner, just coming to, where he had flipped
over the rail. He had blood on his hand, was pale—
I helped him walk to his machine. He ran his hand
over it, called me good man, roared away.
I stood there, fifteen.
Vocation
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 dreamed the trace to the mountains, over the hills,
and there a girl who belonged wherever she was.
But then my mother called us back to the car:
she was afraid; she always blamed the place,
the time, anything my father planned.
Now both of my parents, the long line through the plain,
the meadowlarks, the sky, the world’s whole dream
remain, and I hear him say while I stand between the two,
helpless, both of them part of me:
“Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.”
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.
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.
A Message from the Wanderer
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 occurred 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.
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.
Mein Kampf
In those reaches of the night when your thoughts
burrow in, or at some stabbed interval
pinned by a recollection in daylight,
a better self begs its hands out to you:
That bitter tracery your life wove
looms forth, and the jagged times haggle
and excruciate your reaching palms again—
“A dull knife hurts most.”
Old mistakes come calling: no life
happens just once. Whatever snags
even the edge of your days will abide.
You are a turtle with all the years on your back.
Your head sinks down into the mud.
You must bear it. You need a thick shell in that rain.
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?
Security
Tomorrow will have an island. Before night
I always find it. Then on to the next island.
These places hidden in the day separate
and come forward if you beckon.
But you have to know they are there before they exist.
Some time there will be a tomorrow without any island.
So far, I haven’t let that happen, but after
I’m gone others may become faithless and careless.
Before them will tumble the wide unbroken sea,
and without any hope they will stare at the horizon.
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.
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