252 PART THREE
casually assumed. In that spirit his poems take care with place-names. “This is
the hand I dipped in the Missouri / above Council Bluffs and found the spring,”
he says in “Witness,” which often opened his public readings. “One Home”
tells what might well ground a person to a locale.
A wildcat sprang at Grandpa on the Fourth of July
when he was cutting plum bushes for fuel,
before Indians pulled the West over the edge of the sky...
The sun was over our town; it was like a blade.
Kicking cottonwood leaves we ran toward storms.
Wherever we looked the land would hold us up.In Stafford ’s company we ’re seldom unaware of this land ’s true natives. “Mid-
west,” in his first book West of Your City, recalls seed corn the Indians held
for generations and then “lost in stony ground / the gods told them to plant it
in— / west of your city that corn still lies.” For his own sake and ours, he stays
in touch with native presence.
“Report to Crazy Horse” takes on the voice of a contemporary Indian report-
ing back to the Sioux chief who crushed Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876.
The chokecherries along our valley
still bear a bright fruit. There is good
pottery clay north of here. I remember
our old places. When I pass the Musselshell
I run my hand along those old grooves in the rock.And about Ishi, who survived by hiding as the last member of a northern Cali-
fornia Stone Age people, Stafford writes with exact empathy.
A rock, a leaf, mud, even the grass
Ishi the shadow man had to put back where it was.
In order to live he had to hide that he did.In August 1911, this man staggered exhausted into a clearing and was harbored
by the Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, living until 1916 with a savvy
the Golden State might gain from regaining.
“Our People,” Stafford carefully titled one poem, tying these hunters into
an ecologic story with low-key slant rhymes.
Under the killdeer cry
our people hunted all day
graying toward winter, their lodges
thin to the north wind ’s edge.
Watching miles of march grass
take the supreme caress,