And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

For Bill

97 For Bill No one but you could write, “Our Father Who Art in Heaven can lick their Father Who Art in Heaven.” After we laughed, we saw all wars from Troy to Vietnam in those two lines. You had the gift of turning smiles into thoughts in such a quiet, Quaker way. And yet the saying stayed so casual and conversational and untranslatably Bill Stafford. I still remember when we read in Michigan together—you from a spiral notebook crammed with short poems in longhand. Listening, I strove to spot where the poems stopped, and the prose began. I never found the seam . . . When you wrote Someday, Maybe what was it you were telling us? If it was loss, that day was yesterday. You finished polishing a poem that would be your last, stood up to help your wife, and fell like a soldier. As endings go, that seems regrettably 98 acceptable. But why does it remind me of the silence following a poem’s final line? I want the poem to go on forever, but it doesn’t. And it does. ...