Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms and Poems by William Stafford

Mein Kampf

69 Mein Kampf In those reaches of the night when your thoughts burrow in, or at some stabbed interval pinned by a recollection in daylight, a better self begs its hands out to you: That bitter tracery your life wove looms forth, and the jagged times haggle and excruciate your reaching palms again— “A dull knife hurts most.” Old mistakes come calling: no life happens just once. Whatever snags even the edge of your days will abide. You are a turtle with all the years on your back. Your head sinks down into the mud. You must bear it. You need a thick shell in that rain. 70 You hope. But you know. You may win a war you are sorry to have started. On a battlefield the flies don’t care who wins. Why should I worry? I have pens and plenty of paper. A word is a possibility for meaning, but misleading is one of its lurking riches. Fool that I am, I keep thinking things will work out, that we can coast along while injustice prevails, and somehow it will change. You can make a living by championing the obvious. Far things are romantic. 71 My attitude is this: where you live is not crucial, but how you feel about where you live is crucial. As you know, my poems are organically grown. I am the kind of person who wears the kind of hat I wear. It’s a constant struggle for a human being to attain anything close to the dignity and cleanness of a rock or a piece of wood. In that war we persuaded ourselves that the people we were killing were really bad. A new page always makes me feel optimistic. ...