30 World Literature Today photos : kim stafford 5 poetry trails january–february 2013 • 31 W illiam Stafford was born in Kansas in 1914 and lived many places, but he spent his last thirty-six years in Lake Oswego, Oregon, where he died at home in 1993. All but one of his sixty books of poetry and prose were published while he lived in Oswego. After his death, a retired English teacher on the city council started advocating for some recognition for my father and his poetry, and he prevailed . Beside the Willamette River east of town, at a place that felt a bit like Kansas (cottonwood trees, lazy river, an old railroad bridge, and lots of sky), the powers that be decided to cut a series of individual lines of poetry, and one complete poem, into a ring of nine basalt columns—a little Stonehenge of poetry. And the gravel path along the river to this quiet spot was to be named the William Stafford Path. Great idea, but it took a sculptor with a brawny mind to pull it off, and Oregon artist Frank Boyden was called to make this happen. Frank went to the source, a basalt escarpment three hundred miles away, in the dry country of eastern Washington, near Moses Lake, where a giant machine could pluck the nine individual stone spires a dozen feet tall from where they had crystallized over ten million years ago into hexagonal columns that had weathered to a rusty brown. These columns, eight to ten feet tall, were transported to the site and set upright in a ring with a diameter of three long steps. The space is a kind of room with no roof, a learning place, a silent symposium. On-site, individual lines from William Stafford’s writing were sandblasted onto the column facets: At first it’s not much of a river. Water is always ready to learn. What the river says, that is what I say. One column was left blank (to represent silence, the source), and one featured the installation ’s only complete poem, a mysterious text my father had written a few days before he died. The poem is a warning and an invitation. Many who walk there tell me the poem keeps calling them back to the river path. As one said, “Those words changed my day, if not my life.” You Reading This, Be Ready Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts? When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life – What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around? Portland, Oregon Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, and author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft (University of Georgia Press) and, most recently, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared (Trinity University Press). He also serves as literary executor for the estate of William Stafford. “Lift This New Glimpse That You Found” The William Stafford Path | Lake Oswego, Oregon Kim Stafford ...