Visions

Visions


1
Once in Mexico an old man was
leading on a string—was it a cat?
And we saw it was a tarantula
sidling along in the dust, writing
a message from God for people who
thought they knew where
creature-life ended.


2
We came upon scenes like that,
the world back of a lurid pane of glass.
Like in Reno—they have emptied
Hollywood and ordered the extras and
the stars to go get married and divorced
in Reno, making up their stories as they
go and letting their little dogs
decide which machines or churches
to put nickels and dimes into.


3
One day in a cut quick to the bone
it was white, white; and then
the world came in.
I got a tourniquet going, but the snow
had learned a whole new way to look
at the sky,
as in Maryland in the red fields,
how the stones come startlingly white,
on the battlefields, the cemeteries,
along the gouged-out roads.
There history blows about
on dandelion seeds.


4
On the plains near Wakeeney,
above the ground, short of the earth,
at the level of the eyes,
a sunset ray extended for miles.
we drove along it, and let our thoughts
down gingerly to touch what happened,
where Genevieve lived.
She went out of the world, for death.
Her town holds quiet in the big plain.
Lights witness one by one all over what
still abides. There was no one better.
Her town, her town, her town, the tires
repeat as we go by.


5
For those my friends who want me to know,
to discover and combine:
all my best thoughts
I roll up and let fall carelessly.
It is better than no one follow
even the pattern
I look onto the back of my hand,
for many visions I haven’t dared follow
may gather and combine in a flash.
Away off in a space in the sky,
I let the sky look at me,
and I look back and do not say anything.

William Stafford

Posted over on Poetry Foundation
William Stafford, “Visions” from Going Places (Reno: West Coast Poetry Review, 1974).