Couch cat, wilderness cat

Photo by T R Williams

Our City is Guarded by Automatic Rockets

3.
There is a place behind our hill so real
it makes me turn my head, no matter. There
in the last thicket likes the cornered cat
saved by its claws, now ready to spend
all there is left of the wilderness, embracing
its blood. And that is the way that I will spit
life, at the end of any trail where I smell any hunter,
because I think our story should not end—
or go on in the dark with nobody listening.

— William Stafford, from The Way It Is. New & Selected Poems (Graywolf, 1999).

This is a poem in three numbered sections. I’ve only given you the last section. That’s not fair. Go and find the poem and read it.

You’ll also find an interpretive essay/memoir piece about Stafford by Jonathan Holder, “William Stafford: Genius in Camouflage,” here at Valparaiso Review. Holder says:

Like a fox, like a wildcat, Stafford lived his life in camouflage. He camouflaged his true nature.

. . .

There is another side of Stafford, though, that dispenses with camouflage. It is not affable. It is fierce. We glimpse this side, at the end of “Our City Is Guarded by Automatic Rockets . . .”