WILLIAM STAFFORD

"Love the Butcher Bird Lurks Everywhere"

A gather of apricots fruit pickers left

gleam like reasons for light going higher, higher;

I look half as hard as I can to tease

the fruit out of its green.

        (It is time to run lest pity overtake us,

        and calamity pit invents to accompany itself:

        to sigh is a stern act—we are judged by this air.)

Down the steady eye of the charging bear

a gun barrel swerves—intention, then flame;

and willows do tricks to find an exact place in the wind:

resolution steady, bent to be true.

        (While there’s time

        I call to you by all these dubious guides:

        “Forsake all ways except the way we came.”)

WILLiAM STAFFORD
"Why I Am Happy"

Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.

I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.

And I know where it is.

WILLIAM STAFFORD - "Listening"

My father could hear a little animal step,
or a moth in the dark against the screen,
and every far sound called the listening out
into places where the rest of us had never been.

More spoke to him from the soft wild night
than came to our porch for us on the wind;
we would watch him look up and his face go keen
till the walls of the world flared, widened.

My father heard so much that we still stand
inviting the quiet by turning the face,
waiting for a time when something in the night
will touch us too from that other place.