Looking for Gold

Looking for Gold


A flavor like wild honey begins
when you cross the river.
On a sandbar sunlight stretchs out
its limbs, or is it a sycamore,
so brazen, so clean and bold?
You forgot about the gold.
You stare--and a flavor is rising
all the time of wild honey,
flooding your plans,
flooding the hours till
they waver forward looking back.
They can't return: That river
divides more than two sides
of your life.
The only way is farther,
breathing that country,
becoming wise in its flavor,
a native of the sun.


William Stafford

Posted over on Friends of William Stafford