40. Ode to Bill Stafford
Your poems were never to a set agenda.
What words people marveled at
You put aside, for what others might call
Mundane, out of place, too ordinary.
All too available.
Every morning at five
You the explorer, put on
Your gray shirt, khakis, and shoes
And went in search,
Not of a poem
But the first faint call
Of a fish hook glinting dull in the mud,
A lost country on a wall where
Ants pass on the right,
Black hats with voices
That ride our thoughts.
You the explorer with the dull
Glinting hook, did not throw it away
For lack of promise.
You held fast instead and listened
To its real music,
And danced along the shore.
You became a flute-player,
Father of fish, and they
Hearing the melody
Dance onto the shore
With their fish legs after you
Twisting their fish bodies
Doing the holy wiggle.
You, the explorer, gave your
Gray shirt and khaki pant
To the lead fish – still dancing –
And walked into a high cabin
White from the sanctity
And your sister waiting
With scarves and gloves
Laughs at you because she knows
You’ve been dancing with the fish
To a melody all too forgotten.
How strange that we laugh at your explorer ways
How you go out in search of nothing
And come back complete,
With ants, fish, deer,
Black hats, white suits, a war camp,
Dead people, a lost country.
How is it that for us that come after you
Your music is old.
Must poems come from grand ideas?
We are so intellectual.
We forget sometimes the best
Lesson is the complaint of birds.
And your sister,
Waiting, steps onto the hard
Snow-covered ground
Fastens dogs to the sled
And waits for you to come out
Decked in winter gear.
Father explorer,
What will you find?
Threads in the snow reaching
Deep into our silence?
White horses dead
In front of your sled?
This morning I found your shirt
And khakis, well washed,
Hanging on the gray branch of a tree,
The hook, anchored to the front right pocket,
Still glinting dull.
– Abayomi Animashaun
