William Stafford

Got up on a cool morning
Leaned out a window
No cloud, no wind
Air that flowers heldfor awhile

The only relics left are those long spangled seconds our school clock chipped out when you crossed the social hall and we found each other alive, by our glances never to accept our town's ways, torture for advancement, nor ever again be prisoners ...

Paw marks near one burrow show Graydiggerat home,
I bend low, from down there swivelmy head, grasstop level—the worldgoes on forever, the mountains a biggerburrow, their snow like last winter
From a roominside the world even the stronges...

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 hid...

The light along the hills in the morningcomes down slowly, naming the treeswhite, then coasting the ground for stones to nominate
Notice what this poem is not doing
A house, a house, a barn, the oldquarry, where the river shrugs—how much...

There is a country to cross you willfind in the corner of your eye, inthe quick slip of your foot—air fardown, a snap that might have caught
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passingvoice that finds its way by beingafraid
That country i...

Day after day up there beating my wingswith all the softness truth requiresI feel them shrug whenever I pause:they class my voice among tentative things,
And they credit fact, force, battering
I dance my way toward the family of knowing,...

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 ...

Time tells them
They go along touching the grass, the feathery ends
When it feels just so, they start the mowing machine, leaving the land its long windrows, and air strokes the leaves dry
Sometimes you begin to push; you want to hu...

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 s...

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, ...

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 th...