"Remembering" When there was air, when you could breathe any day if you liked, and if you wanted to you could run. I used to climb those hills back … - William Stafford

Now I carry those days in a tiny box
wherever I go. I open the lid like this
and let the light glimpse and then glance away.
There is a sigh like my breath when I do this.
Some days I do this again and again. — William Stafford, from “Remembering,” The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems, ed. Robert Bly (HarperPerennial, 1993)

Assurance You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow pulls across the hills and thrums, or the silence after lightning before it says its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head — that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone. The whole wide world pours down.

Most mornings I get away, slip out the door before light, set forth on the dim, gray road, letting my feet find a cadence that softly carries me on. Nobody is up — all alone my journey begins.

Always write in the wilderness.