Is This Feeling About the West Real

Is This Feeling About the West Real?

All their lives out here some people know
they live in a hemisphere beyond what Columbus discovered.
These people look out and wonder: Is it magic? Is it
the oceans of air off the Pacific? You can't
walk through it without wrapping a new
piece of time around you, a readiness for a meadowlark,
that brinkmanship a dawn can carry for lucky people
all through the day.

But if you don't get it, this bonus, you can
go home full of denial, and live out your years.
Great waves can pass unnoticed outside your door;
stars can pound silently on the roof; your teakettle
and cozy life inside can deny everything outside—
whole mountain ranges, history, the holocaust,
sainthood, Crazy Horse.

Listen—something else hovers out here, not
color, not outlines or depth when air
relieves distance by hazing far mountains,
but some total feeling or other world
almost coming forward, like when a bell sounds
and then leaves a whole countryside waiting.

Time for Serenity

"I like to live in the sound of water,
In the feel of mountain air. A sharp
Reminder hits me: this world is still alive;
It stretches out there shivering toward its own
Creation, and I'm a part of it. Even my breathing
Enters into an elaborate give-and-take,
This bowing to sun and moon, day or night,
Winter, summer, storm, still –- this tranquil
Chaos that seems to be going somewhere.
This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
This motionless turmoil, this everything dance."

Silver Star

SILVER STAR


To be a mountain you have to climb alone
and accept all that rain and snow. You have to look
far away when evening comes. If a forest
grows, you stand there leaning against
the wind, waiting for someone with faith enough
to ask you to move. Great stones will tumble
against each other and gouge your sides. A storm
will live somewhere in your canyons hoarding its lightning.

If you are lucky, people will give you a dignified
name and bring crowds to admire how sturdy you are,
how long you can hold still for the camera. And some time,
they say, if you last long enough you will hear God;
a voice will roll down from the sky and all your patience
will be rewarded. The whole world will hear it: "Well done."

--William Stafford, Even in Quiet Places - from the Methow River Poems