I am reading the last poems
of William Stafford.  They fill
with light upon opening.
Their simplicity
spills and fills me
with light.

Elsewhere
poets are nouning verbs
and verbing nouns, never met
adjectives they didn’t absorb, know mostly
how not to be themselves
when they write.  They praise themselves
endlessly for their cleverness.  They all sound
the same.  I can find these poems anywhere.
I trip over them in the dark.

I am reading
the last poems of then-dying, now-dead William Stafford
and the darkness is missing from them,
from around them.  All that’s there is light and
William Stafford, whom I never knew,
who fills me with a light
I am not too used to finding
these days in a poem.