It’s been a while. I’d like to say it’s been too long, but the truth is that William Stafford reappears on a day when I needed him, in the outskirts of an autumn afternoon, at the edge of a song.

And song, itself, is central to Stafford’s verse—it recurs, returns, resurges, and sometimes revolts (as when the songs are national anthems or related to a war he refused to fight). “Why I Am a Poet” could be considered an ars poetica, or even an anti-anthem—three quatrains appended by a single line.

And the land is always palpable in Stafford’s poems—where the dirt exists in a mixture of wonder and humility. “Something That Happens Right Now” begins in a confessional tone that reaches towards a maple tree in the distant past, only to swerve into an expectant silence, a silence that precedes the adult’s knowledge of the world.

Death isn’t a terror so much as a wonder in this poem, in this unlineated creation bursting at the seams with marvel. I want to remember being young and feeling that cosmic silence, or feeling small and secure in it.

I will read this one to my kids tonight once the darkness arrives…to re-member the power of longing in a world that cautions us against it.

And one more. One more Stafford to tuck into a pocket, to carry through days when the words argue with one another and the images fizzle. One more for any writer today seeking “the great dance, walking alone”….