256 PART THREE
purely physical, nonhuman vocabulary so far, gives way to human reason. A
colon buttressing the line, this poem’s firmest punctuation, promises to sum up
everything so far. Yet instead, after “decision, decision:” we get
thunderous examples. I place my feet
Thunderous?—when the well, spring, plow, swallows, and swallow heart are
silent? And they’re examples of... what? Country living? Avian behavior? At
least and at last the sentence stops, after “thunderous examples.” Then a state-
ment of the simplest sort: subject, verb, object—and not just any subject, but
the poem’s “I,” till now invisible, the observant eye, the modest self entering
this scene to say “I place my feet”
with care in such a world.
Finally a decent sentence, with an iambic lilt familiar to us after centuries: Keats’s
“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,” Frost ’s “But I am done with apple-
picking now.” Stafford ends with his poem’s only formal phrasing:
I place my feet / with care in such a world.
Carefully breaking that news, he tells more by telling less than we expected.
Thunderous silence, unexplained examples—those we ’ll have to realize for
ourselves. That ’s his mode of generosity. “A part of the fun of writing,” Stafford
said shortly before his death, “is to have something that sounds so simple until
later in the quiet of the night.” “The Well Rising” offers thunderous examples
of sheer being, of a careful footprint, of the clear, quiet attentiveness on which
so much depends in “such a world.”
“Everything excited me,” when hunting as a young boy in Kansas with his
father.
On west was the salt marsh. Teal would be coming in, canvasbacks, buffle-
heads. In the early dark we crept through tall weeds, past mysterious trees. At
first light long scarfs of ducks came in talking to each other as they dropped.
The seething cattails and grasses whispered and gushed in the shadows. And
the river was there, going on westward, past islands, along groves, into the
wilderness, an endless world for exploring. I stop now and worship those
times. The air was clear and sharp; no one was ahead of us; all was like in the
first days of creation. We could wander all day, try to get lost, always able to
take care of ourselves.One day “rambling the countryside” they saw a hawk landing in a cottonwood
across the field. When they got there they couldn’t spot it, and the boy stood
waiting to be shown. “Bill, maybe your eyes are better than mine. Maybe you
will be the one to see the hawk.” His father did him this grace, as “The Well
Rising” does us.