Holy Saturday: On Tombs, Prisoners, and Antelopes in the Grass

On Christmas Day 2018, I opened a gift from my son, the junior high principal, the poet. It was a hardback edition of a William Stafford book of poetry (the softcover edition having been on my bookshelf for many years).

But this one different, and not just that its cover was hard. On the title page was Stafford’s signature, a luminous find in the mammoth Powell’s Bookstore of Downtown Portland – likely landing there after Stafford’s teaching career at local Lewis and Clark College.

Tears filled my eyes, because I have a son who thinks about these things, who loves poetry and literature.

And tears filled my eyes as I randomly opened the pages and read whatever my eyes fell upon, moved again by Stafford’s utter simplicity and by his way of jumping into the stream and letting the current take him wherever it would. He had no sense of building to a great crescendo in his poems, just tracking along to see where the poem led, as if each line were some golden thread which the reader could hold onto and trace to something else that might arise in his or her imagination.

I sat among grandchildren -- busily devouring gifts amidst loud laughter and chatter -- quietly reading along in Stafford, choking back the Christmas tears.

This is one of the poems that had my address on it, and still does . . . maybe because it explores themes I’ve often pondered for myself . . . and maybe because it is sufficiently unresolved to remind me of my life.

On this Holy Saturday, I give William Stafford’s poem about tight spaces, prisoners, and antelopes in the grass to you.


A Message from the Wanderer
William 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 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.

[William Stafford, Stories That Could Be True (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 9.]

Learning: A Poem by William Stafford

I have lots of reasons to love William Stafford's poetry. This poem is one of them . . . simple, straight, spare.

Stafford was a pacifist and a conscientious objector. It's worthwhile to spend some time keeping company with this poem.

Learning
by William Stafford

A piccolo played then a drum.
Feet began to come – a part
of the music. Here came a horse,
clippety clop, away.

My mother said, "Don't run –
the army is after someone
other than us. If you stay
you'll learn our enemy."

Then he came, the speaker. He stood
in the square. He told us who
to hate. I watched my mother's face,
its quiet. "That's him," she said.

[Stafford, The Way It Is, p. 9]

Letting Yourself into the River

Sometimes I'll read a poem by William Stafford and be taken by its simplicity. Further readings of the poem will peel back layer after layer of meaning, and I'll find more and more points of connection. That's what a good poem does with me . . . it allows me many places through which to enter into it, to find myself in it. Stafford's poetry gives me plenty of doorways and windows through which to enter.

As I read various poets, I find that many, many contemporary poets were influenced by William Stafford. Many feel indebted to him.

I don't know whether Robert Bly would say that about Stafford, but he might. Bly has something of Stafford's spirit about him. His poetry is often tied to images from the natural world, like Stafford's. Bly has devoted many years to helping men give attention to matters of soul and spirit. Though he has done so outside the Church, he is familiar with the human soul, and his poetry reflects his sensitivity to matters of life-meaning and soul.

I read both Stafford and Bly quite a bit. Awhile back my eye was drawn to Bly's poem, "When William Stafford Died." I've read it and pondered it quite often recently. I've given quite a bit of time to exploring the poem's points of entry, the places where I find resonance with it.

Here's the poem.


When William Stafford Died
Robert Bly


Well, water goes down the Montana gullies.
“I’ll just go around this rock and think
About it later.” That’s what you said.
When death came, you said, “I’ll go there.”

There’s no sign you’ll come back. Sometimes
My father sat up in the coffin and was alive again.
But I think you were born before my father,
And the feet they made in your time were lighter.

One dusk you were gone. Sometimes a fallen tree
Holds onto a rock, if the current is strong.
I won’t say my father did that, but I won’t
Say he didn’t either. I was watching you both.

If all a man does is to watch from the shore,
Then he doesn’t have to worry about the current.
But if affection has put us into the stream,
Then we have to agree to where the water goes.


[Robert Bly, Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 16 – 17.]


I can't say anything about what Bly intended through his poem. But I can say something about what I discover in it for myself.

The striking image for me is the water flowing downhill . . . gullies, streams, rivers . . . all with their current flowing downstream, flowing to wherever the gullies take you. Once in the current, you have little say about where you go. You have to accept the limitations of the banks. You have to accept what the terrain looks like and feels like as you flow down to sea-level. And you have to accept what is at the end of the journey.

The option is to stand on the bank, to never let yourself into the river. If you leave yourself on the bank, you can watch the current, you can notice the nuances of the stream and study its science, but you cannot really engage it. And you will never end up where the current goes. Bly says, "If all a man does is to watch from the shore, // Then he doesn't have to worry about the current."

It seems to me that this is a crucial image for life . . . that if something (Bly says, "affection") puts us into the stream, "then we have to agree to where the water goes." There are things in life that I don't get to choose. There are things in life I wouldn't choose if given a choice. But once in the current, I open myself to whatever comes, to wherever it takes me. And then my life becomes about how I navigate those waters, how I stay in the flow, how meaning comes from even the rocks and ravines of the journey.

Bly says, "If affection has put us into the stream . . ." I've wondered the last couple of weeks what that word would be for me. Is it affection? Or something else? freedom? passion? hunger? love? What puts me into the stream?

Then, last week . . . four days at the Benedictine Monastery in Pecos, New Mexico . . . the Pecos River valley and mountains on every side . . . walking on a trail that heads north from the monastery, along the Pecos River . . . this is what I saw.

Immediately my mind went to the poem. I had been with it enough to remember the lines, so when I saw this tree just off the trail, my mind immediately went to, "Sometimes a fallen tree // Holds onto a rock, if the current is strong."

This fallen tree, stubbornly holding onto the bank, refusing to drop into the current, resisting the life of the river became a kind of symbol for me. If this fallen tree would not let itself go, what about me?

The end of the river may be death -- the poem, after all, is called, "When William Stafford Died" -- but the tree that never drops into the current is dead already.

So the convergence of poetry with real-life images from the created world -- river and tree -- stays with me. The poem is not finished doing its work with me. And though my time in Pecos is over and I'm back in my daily life-work, the image of the fallen tree lives on within me.

For the Sake of Your Soul

Robert Bly is one of my favorite contemporary poets. He writes from the deep place of soul and soul-consciousness. Several of his poems are among my favorites. Over the last couple of months I have regularly read his poem (which I may post later), "When William Stafford Died." It is about the power of affection and passion, and the willingness to live the life one has been given. It challenges me to live the only life that is authentically mine to live.

Then this evening I heard this Bly poem read, and in the few hours since have read it myself another 10 - 12 times. Try it on for yourself.


One Source of Bad Information
by Robert Bly

There’s a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it’s a girl.

This child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
“Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”

You live with this child but you don’t know it.
You are in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.


[Robert Bly, Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems.]

Just to Remind Ourselves

One of the great joys of being father to my two great young adult children is they share with me books and music they've found that they know I'll like. Very often they find books by the circle of authors I read, books I have somehow missed.

I spent several days with both of them last week -- full of laughter and joy -- and one of the gifts of our time together was a book of poetry by William Stafford that I had missed. My son, a writer and poet himself, checked it out from his local library and brought it to show me.

We both have our favorite William Stafford poems, and some of them overlap. This particular book, compiled by Stafford's daughter after his death, has various writings from throughout his life.

The book's material is organized and presented around the theme of Stafford's pacifism. He reflected in journals, interviews and poetry on being a conscientious objector during World War 2. His objection to the war was religious, moral and practical. War doesn't work as well as reconciliation, Stafford believed. So he refused to fight, and was taken with other conscientious objectors to a labor camp in California where they lived in meager quarters and spent long hours in manual labor.

Stafford had a long history of thinking counter and looking at things from the other side. Rather than demonize "the enemy," Stafford wondered what it was like to be in his or her shoes. In the language of WW2, what would it change in me if I imagined the families of the German or Japanese soldiers, if I envisioned the fear in those soldiers -- surely the same fear that lived within American soldiers? In more contemporary language, if I identified with a member of the Taliban playing with his children or eating a meal with his family, how would that change how I thought about "the enemy"? Those are the kinds of questions Stafford pondered and wrote about.

That way of stepping into the world arose within him at a young age. In 1920 the young Stafford came home from school and described to his mother how the kids at school had surrounded two new students on the playground and taunted the two because they were black. His mother asked, "What did you do, Billy?"

Stafford replied, "I went and stood by them."

So with thanksgiving for William Stafford -- and for my son, who brought him to me yet again -- I offer Stafford's poem for thinking counter about the world.

For the Unknown Enemy
William Stafford

This monument is for the unknown
good in our enemies. Like a picture
their life began to appear: they
gathered at home in the evening
and sang. Above their fields they saw
a new sky. A holiday came
and they carried the baby to the park
for a party. Sunlight surrounded them.

Here we glimpse what our minds long turned
away from. The great mutual
blindness darkened that sunlight in the park,
and the sky that was new, and the holidays.
This monument says that one afternoon
we stood here letting a part of our minds
escape. They came back, but different.
Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life.

This monument is for you.

[William Stafford, "For the Unknown Enemy," Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War, ed. and intro. by Kim Stafford, p. 96.]

William Stafford Poetry for the Weekend

At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border
William Stafford

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.


[William Stafford, Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War, p. 87.]

A Rilke Poem: About Attending to the Patterns of Our Days

Orchard and Road

In the traffic of our days
may we attend to each thing
so that patterns are revealed
amidst the offerings of chance.

All things want to be heard,
so let us listen to what they say.
In the end we will hear what we are:
the orchard or the road leading past.

[Rainer Maria Rilke, "Orchard and Road" from the Collected French Poems, quoted in A Year with Rilke, trans. by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 131.]


Quakers say, "Let your life speak" or, "Listen to your life." It's more than just a saying that encourages us to live large.

I realize that when I'm faced with a decision or with some choice that feels significant, something inside me already knows what to do. I think that's true for all of us. It's the part of a human being I'd call "soul," or the "God-seed" within, that part of our being that already is connected and rooted in the soil of God's goodness. The soul is grounded in the reality of all that is. It knows what to do.

[Note: Mary Oliver begins her classic poem, "The Journey," with those very words:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began . . .]

So Quakers might say to us, "Listen to your life. Let it speak. It will tell you what to do." For many of us, that may seem easier said than done.

In the poem above, Rilke suggests much the same thing. "In the traffic of our days," he says, pay attention to each thing, to the movements and patterns and thoughts and reactions. Attend to what happens. Don't stumble blindly through the day, through the "traffic," as if the ordinary and mundane did not have some significance. Maybe in another day or from the wisdom of another tradition, he would say, "Live reflectively" or "Be mindful."

Because there are patterns at work within us, and perhaps there are predictable patterns at work in the world. The patterns of the world may have to do with image and conformity and popular notions of what it means to be successful; we are invited, though, to notice the more intimate patterns of our own DNA through the traffic of our days.

And to quote yet another poem that has come to mean a great deal to me, if we are not mindful of the exterior patterns or rhythms which press in upon us and to which we give ourselves and which we assume to be true in the world,

"a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong God home we may miss our star."
(William Stafford, "A Ritual to Read to Each Other")

We tend to assume the patterns others have made (the "wrong gods") and miss the patterns that live within us ("our star")! The patterns and assumptions that are woven into our essence are waiting to be heard. They are, in Stafford's image, the "star" we must follow.

In the second stanza of Rilke's poem, he repeats three times the image of "heard . . . listen . . . hear."

Then he says it: The attending and listening is so that we might "hear what we are."

It takes a radical leap of faith to trust God . . . maybe even more radical to trust ourselves and our own capacity to hear and live into "what we are."

This, however, is the ultimate vocation of every human being. This is what we are made for. This is who we are.

We begin to live into this vocation by attending to the patterns of our days.

Unexpected Graces

This week I watched another birthday come and go. At a certain point years ago I stopped getting charged up about my birthday. I find them good excuses to treat myself to some small indulgence, perhaps, but the day sweeps in and out without feeling much different than most other days.

The "celebration" this week was even more underplayed. I realized a couple of weeks ago that on my birthday I'd be sitting in a chemotherapy chair at Methodist Hospital. That's a sober realization, especially when folks ask, "What are you doing special for your birthday?" Well, I guess chemotherapy is special in its own way.

So this week I determined to enter the day alert to experience the gifts in the birth day. I wanted to notice the unexpected graces in the day. I didn't have any idea what I'd find. Frankly, chemotherapy from the previous day left me feeling drained and out-of-sorts, so the morning of my birthday I wasn't too sure that I'd notice anything to redeem the day.

The first grace came in the chemo chair itself. I slept through the first part of the infusion. Then for the last two hours of the treatment I watched The Natural with my daughter on the small television set up in the chemotherapy cubicle. It's a favorite of our family, one that we return to again and again -- a movie more about failure and flawed character and redemption than about baseball -- and she had wanted to watch it again for a few weeks. We watched it together, recited the lines from memory, laughed some, and cried some. We talked about the life-themes in the movie, and the ways the movie touched us. They were golden moments.

The second grace came later in the day, when a package of used books I had ordered last week arrived at my door. For me, ripping into a package of books is something akin to Christmas morning for a 10 year-old, so that in itself would have been a real grace.

But the unexpected grace came when I laid the books out in front of me and slowly went through them one by one. Online I had purchased a couple of poetry books by William Stafford, one of my favorite poets. I paid $.01 for each of them -- that's right, a penny -- plus shipping. So I was thoroughly surprised when I opened one of them and found Stafford's signature on the title page! I immediately knew it was Stafford's hand, as I have seen some of his hand-written poems. It was a thrill, a real serendipity.

And then this Stafford poem from the book:

Waiting for God

This morning I breathed in. It had rained
early and the sycamore leaves tapped
a few drops that remained, while waving
the air's memory back and forth
over the lawn and into our open
window. Then I breathed out.

This deliberate day eased
past the calendar and waited. Patiently
the sun instructed shadows how to move;
it held them, guided their gradual defining.
In the great quiet I carried my life on,
in again, out again.

[Passwords, p. 36]

Security by William Stafford

My son found and passed on this poem by William Stafford.


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.

A Poem about Following by William Stafford

Saint Matthew and All

Lorene – we thought she’d come home. But
it got late, and then days. Now
it has been years. Why shouldn’t she,
if she wanted? I would: something comes
along, a sunny day, you start walking;
you meet a person who says, “Follow me,”
and things lead on.

Usually, it wouldn’t happen, but sometimes
the neighbors notice your car is gone, the
patch of oil in the driveway, and it fades.
They forget.

In the Bible it happened – fishermen, Levites.
They just went away and kept going. Thomas,
away off in India, never came back.

But Lorene – it was a stranger maybe, and he
said, “Your life, I need it.” And nobody else did.


[William Stafford, The Way It Is, (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press), 228]

A Ritual to Read to Each Other by William Stafford

A Ritual to Read to Each Other
by William Stafford

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 dike.

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 recognize 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.

(In The Darkness around Us Is Deep)


This is one of my favorite Stafford poems. An inner stirring within me confirms its truth.

Patterns made by others prevail within me. Taking the tail of the elephant in front of me, I'm liable to get lost and miss the circus, or to follow the wrong god home and miss the star written with my own name.

So it is important to wake up -- awake people need to be awake. Sleeping through life, those familiar patterns prevail and I'll fail to recognize that my feet are only stepping where the elephants in front of me have gone.

I've spent enough years missing my star.