Poems

There | Differences | In The Workshop After I Read My Poem Aloud | Wildflowers

DIFFERENCES                                 in memory of William Stafford There was your knack for sounding regional in every region and the way you swam out past the single-minded, past the blocked on shore belaboring their alibis. Such gumption could hold a poet afloat in the cold sea or start a car on ice, the poems sifting down like snowflakes: differences made of tiny differences. I think of you in your brim hat, white shirt and old jeans, a morning's words in your shoulderbag, crossing the grass to sit with us in a circle outside the old Fort Worden schoolhouse. It was the summer of  '84 and I wanted to be your student. But you were tricky like wind and nearly drove me crazy when you refused, coyote-faced, to praise or blame. You wouldn't let us, any more than generals, use your mind. You steered us back toward recklessness and I've just begun to understand this need to give a poem up not to miss the next one. No one had ever leaned on me to lower my standards, make grammar an enemy, greet failure gratefully. All these heresies – a life – in harmony under the voice. A poem finds its way the way you'd listen as you roved a field alone, alert for local differences.   First published in Prairie Schooner. Also in Another Way to Begin (Finishing Line Press: 2006) and As If Gravity Were a Theory (Cider Press Review: 2006).