William Stafford

Originally posted 10/22/2012.

The last poems
of William Stafford
fill this room with light
when I open to them.

There are
poets who noun verbs
and verb nouns,
who never met
adjectives they didn’t
absorb, who know mostly
how not to be themselves
when they write; they praise themselves
endlessly for their own cleverness.
I can find their poems anywhere.
I often trip over them in the dark.

Reading the last poems
of then-dying,
now-dead
William Stafford, searching
for any darkness in there
that he certainly
would have been allowed
to express, but
it’s missing.
All that’s there is
light and
William Stafford.