Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

EARTH HOME TO WILLIAM STAFFORD 253

they looked out over the earth,

and the north wind felt like truth.

Fluttering in that wind

they stood there on the world,

clenched in their own lived story,

under the killdeer cry.

As “our people” becomes “they,” and each sentence metes out “their own” story,
we feel Stafford ’s empathy, a deft word in each sentence—“thin,” “caress,”
“clenched”—while verbs show this story has faded. Yet a later poem, “The
Earth,” extends Native American terrain under our feet today by reviving an
ancient awe of the land. We may still “feel our own / shudder—the terror of
having such a great / friend, undeserved.”
Terror and closeness coexist in Stafford ’s sense of the wild, which is not all
benign and can spring a wildness in language itself. Once, he says,

On the third finger of my left hand

under the bank of the Ninnescah

a muskrat whirled and bit to the bone.

The mangled hand made the water red.

Buckling him to land, water, and animal nature, this “Ceremony” imagines
“the current flowing through the land, /... and the river richer by a kind of
marriage.”
Sometimes a sense of nature erupts with sacred force. “The Move to Cali-
fornia,” about uprooting and going west after World War II, starts at springs
in Idaho, just over the continental divide, with something that nearly defies
language:

Water leaps from lava near Hagerman,

piles down riverward over rock

reverberating tons of exploding shock

out of that stilled world.

Thosel- and v- and r-sounds cascade through “leaps from lava,” then “river-
ward over rock / reverberating,” and those verbs arouse a geologic oracle. Wa-
ter “leaps” and “piles down” over a wild verb “reverberating,” then “exploding”
springs from a “stilled world.” The travelers stop to drink where violence joins
stillness and a tribe could worship.
Of his several thousand poems, about one a day for fifty years, “The Well
Rising” speaks perfectly for Stafford. Every act of speech counts in the body of
this poem: title, verb form, sentences, punctuation, line breaks, rhyme, rhythm,
repetition.