606
and
A person mixing colors bends low
when we walk there. "Why are you
so intent on that bottle you are stirringT"
And then I know: in that little bottle
he has the sky.
But many things in the world
haven't yet happened. You help
them by. thinking and writing and acting.
Where they begin, you greet them
or stop them. You come along
and sustain the new things.
PAUL ZWEIG
This sounds like the sort of idea an adult would mistakenly invent to amuse a
child. But the child would miss the point, because the images do not have the
innocence of something "seen" for the first time. Although they
try
for that
quality, they come up instead with commonplace statements and coy senti–
mentality. Much of
Sometime Maybe
fails in the same way. Here is another
example of what I mean:
One day Sun found a new canyon.
It
hid for miles and ran far away,
then it went under a mountain. Now Sun
~oes
over but knows it is there. And that
IS
why Sun shines-it is always looking.
Be like the sun.
The attempted myth creates no echoes here. The strained simplicity of the
poem chokes it off before it can gather resonance. One need only
recall Stafford's extraordinary myth poem in
The Rescued Year,
"The Animal
That Drank Up Sound," to see how powerfully this mode has worked for him
in the past. But in
Sometime Maybe
the ideas fall limply on the page. One has
the sense of a formula being offered, instead of a perception still damp with its
birth-water.
But Stafford is too good a poet to be defined by his failures, even in a book
as disappointing as
Sometime Maybe.
Here and there one comes upon poems
which are as quietly startling as any Stafford has written. In the end, one feels
that
Sometime Maybe
represents not so much a flagging of Stafford's powers as
an editorial mistake, made all too easily because the convention of simple talk
lay at hand, ready to speak on when the poet himself had fallen silent. Here is
one of the wholly lovely poems in the book which must be added to the num–
ber of Stafford's finest; it is entitled, "The Widow Who Taught at an Army
School" :
She planted bullets in a window box,
lead tips up like a
TOW
of buds,
and she told the children: "Every charge
