You make me walk my town, its terrible
streets that peel day after day for years
and fall into the sky, till I’m drowned
in time. Even if I shut my eyes the lilacs
come their tide, and Pauline’s old house
honks by in a long, low, dying moan
as I fade for my life, wild for this safety
of now, far from the thousand hurts—
those friends moving there still,
fresh, open faces, long bodies leaning
after my last goodby, when war came, and
we left all that seething, and put the lid on.
William Stafford
(1914-1993) William Stafford published more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose including Traveling Through the Dark, which won the National Book Award in 1963; The Rescued Year; Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems; and Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation. Among his many honors and awards were a Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Western States Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry, as well as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970.
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