Memory of William Stafford
(“Follow the golden thread”)
Bill read to us in 1975.
Each poem was more comfortable than the last.
We held our applause as the genial poet
massaged our thoughts for hours.
In poems, you need to keep on moving: follow
the golden thread until you get to what you know.
Curiosity happens, you can’t help that. But never hurry.
Warp and weave, rely on knots to change the way.
Tied to my home in Missouri, I knew the Kansas
in Bill right away: the spare line tugging
at uncertainty; oaks reaching up for oak space,
much prized by flat space; the yarn
in home stories he heard and hammered into poems.
Kansas teaches us that pioneers survive:
they talk spare talk; they talk straight talk
with twists skipping like dust devils over soil;
that they must emerge coolly from intense heat,
warmly from intense cold; that no rivers,
even small rivers, begin in Kansas; that moving by
the great rivers cut deeply on its edges.
Like the rivers, Bill meandered across his broad plain,
joining his own kind at muddy deltas of plain truth.
I was 29.
Bill took my photograph, saying he collected images
of poets that he met. I was afraid of fuzzy thoughts,
not words; afraid of half-lives without anchor
in empty spaces; afraid to call myself a poet.
When the photograph arrived, I made a friend.
Bill lent his life to me, that part revealed in poems.
He would not accept a tribute, but he would agree to lead.
Show me, Jayhawker.
Keith Moul has published his poems for more than 40 years in the US, Canada and Britain. He’s the author of Theodore Roethke’s Career, an annotated bibliography; and numerous translations of Anglo-Saxon alliterative poems. He’s retired now after 30 years in the insurance business.
