David J Bauman

There were those quizzical first moments when I had to turn my head sideways to figure out his syntax, but I came to love his words very quickly. He seemed to describe a way into his view of the world in his poem “Figuring Out How it is:”

How it tilts while you are thinking

and then you know. How it makes no difference

for a long time–then it does.

The text of the entire poem is hard to find online, buried in a larger academic text, but I think I’ll do a reading of it here soon. While a lot of his poems are searchable on the web, many are impossible to find, and you really should be heading to the library or local bookshop to pick up a few volumes of his poems for yourself. Not just the anthologies, though they are helpful for an overview. But there is really nothing like digging into a collection that a poet put together and specifically placed those poems in one grouping. It’s often a look into a time and place that individual poems only give you glimpses of, as through a knot-hole in the fence of a larger work.

Back to Indiana over 20 years ago. I was lonely, missing my new wife, our first child not yet born, missing my hills, and secret places in their hollows and valleys. Somehow this poet of the western US helped me feel less alone, helped me hold onto my sanity, avoid that pit of panic I was slipping toward. I got to hear one of his readings in my creative writing course, but I never got to meet him, or hear him read in person, and that’s a sad thought.

So instead, I share him with you, hoping you will find some similar moment of peace or recognition in this wise old man’s words.

At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border

by William Stafford

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed — or were killed — on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

From The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems
Graywolf Press

Copyright 1975, 1998 Estate of William Stafford

For the text of “Your Life” from the October, 1987 edition of Poetry Magazine, click here.