A few days after my father, poet William Stafford, died, I was sleeping alone at my parents’ house when something woke me at around 4 A.M. My mother, who was away, had told me that she, too, had been wakened since his death at this, my father’s customary writing time. The moon was shining through the bedroom window, but that wasn’t it. Everything was still, the neighborhood quiet. The house wanted me to rise. It was the hour beckoning: a soft tug, nothing mystical, just a habit to the place. The air was sweet, life was good; it was time.

I dressed and shuffled down the hall. In the kitchen, I remembered how he would make himself a cup of instant coffee and some toast. I followed his custom, putting the kettle on, slicing some bread my mother had made, letting the plink of the spoon stirring the coffee and the scrape of the butter knife be the only sound. And then I was to go to the couch and lie down with pen and paper. I pulled the green mohair blanket from the closet, turned on a lamp, and settled into a horizontal position on the couch where my father had greeted maybe ten thousand mornings with his pen and paper. I put my head on the pillow just where his head had worn through the silk.

What should I write? There was no sign, only a feeling of generosity in the room. A street light brightened the curtain beside me, but the rest of the room was dark. I let my gaze roam the walls, the fireplace, the dim rectangle of a painting, the hooded box of the television cabinet, the table with magazines. It was all ordinary, suburban. But there was this beckoning. In the dark house, it felt as if my father’s death had become an empty bowl filled from below, like a cavern that brimmed cold with water from a deep spring. There was grief, but also this abundance. So many people had written to us saying, “Words cannot begin to express how we feel. . . .” They can’t? I honored the sentiment, for I, too, am sometimes mute with grief. But words can begin to express how it is, especially if they can be relaxed, brimming in their own plain way.

I looked for a long time at the bouquet of sunflowers on the coffee table beside the couch. I remembered that sunflowers are the state flower of Kansas. I remembered my father’s poem about yellow cars. I remembered how, the night before, we had eaten the last of his third summer planting of green beans.

I thought back to the last writing my father had done in this place, the morning of August 28. As often, he had begun with a line from ordinary experience: a stray call from an insurance agent trying to track down what turned out to be a different William Stafford. The call had amused him; the words had stayed with him. And that morning, he had begun to write:

“Are you Mr. William Stafford?”
“Yes, but . . .”

As often, he had started with the daily news from his own life, and come to deeper things:

Well, it was yesterday.
Sunlight used to follow my hand.
And that’s when the strange siren-like sound flooded
over the horizon and rushed through the streets of our town. . . .

But I wasn’t wishing to delve into his writing now, only his writing life. I was inhabiting the cell of his habit, up earlier than anyone, simply listening.

The house was so quiet, I was distinctly aware of my breathing, how sweet each breath came into me, and the release of each exhalation. My eyesight, too, felt sharpened. The edge of the coffee table held a soft gleam from the street light. The jostled stack of magazines had a kind of sacred logic where he had touched them. I saw how each sunflower had dropped a little constellation of pollen on the table. The pollen seemed to burn, intense in color and purpose. But the house — the house didn’t want me to write anything profound. The soft tug that had wakened me, which I still felt, wanted me to be there with myself, to be awake to everything ordinary, to sip my bitter instant coffee, to gaze about, and to remember. I remembered how my father had once said that such time alone would allow anyone to go inward, and thereby to go outward. Paradoxically, he said, you had to go into yourself in order to find the patterns that were bigger than your own life.

I started to write ordinary things. And then I came to the sunflowers, and the spirit of the house warned me that their story could be told wrong if I tried to make something of it. For it’s not about trying. It’s not about writing poems. It’s not about achievement, certainly not about fame, or importance. It’s about being there with the plain life of a time before first light, with breath, with the street light on one side of the house and the moon on the other; about the worn silk, the blanket, and that little dusting of pollen from the sunflowers.

My head fit the dent in the pillow; the blanket warmed my body; my hand moved easily, carelessly with the pen. I heard the scratch on paper. If this was grieving, it was active in plain things. I found myself relishing the simplest words, mistrusting metaphor, amused by my own habits with words, forgiving myself an occasional big thought:

. . . to pause at the gate to take off the one big shoe
of his body and step forward light as wind . . .

I could forgive myself because there was this abundance in time and place and habit. And then I saw I had a page. I closed my notebook and rose for the day. There was much to do, but I had done the big thing already.

Who will take my father’s place in the world of poetry? No one. Who will take his place in this daily practice of the language of the tribe? Anyone who wishes. He once said the field of writing will never be crowded — not because people can’t do important work, but because they don’t think they can. This way of writing beckons to anyone who wishes to rise early and listen, to write without fear of either achievement or failure. There is no burden, only a beckoning. When the house beckons, you will wake easily. There is a stove where you can make something warm. There is a light that leaves much of the room dark. There is a place to be comfortable, a place you have worn with the friendly shape of your body. There is your own breath, the treasury of your recollection, the blessing of your casual gaze. What is this way of writing, of listening easily and telling simply? There is the wall, the table, and whatever stands this day for Kansas pollen in your own precious life.

This essay originally appeared in Hungry Mind Review.

— Ed.