There’s a poem I love by William Stafford, “Why I Am Happy.” I think it’s my favorite poem. It always reminds me of what poetry can do:
Now has come an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.
I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.
And I know where it is.
I love all the things the poem doesn’t say, how spare the lines are and the jumps between lines and across them. I love all the white space. I love in the second line how we suddenly move to a lake, not a particular lake but a lake “so blue and far nobody knows it.”
I especially love the big leap at the end, across the white space between the second stanza and the last line: “And I know where it is.” There’s something so surprising and moving about that. Emphatic.
The poem in its clear, calm voice speaks of a beautiful place, and yet without denying the “terribly cold, innocent spin” of the earth. The implication isn’t that the poet has retreated forever. It’s not that he doesn’t care. The suggestion is that the speaker goes to the lake in the summer, temporarily, and while he’s there he experiences a kind of detachment. It’s “an easy time.”
The sadness and violence of the world exist, he knows about them, and yet they don’t shake this sense of freedom. They don’t take away his sense of the lake itself, which by the end, I think, has become an inner lake, a source, a center from which he can act in the world—as Stafford himself did as a conscientious objector in World War II and a fierce advocate for nonviolence all his life.
Whenever I read this poem I think of a lake north of Colville, Washington where my father and grandfather used to take us fishing—Black Lake, in the mountains in the far Northeastern corner of the state, near the Canadian border.
Black Lake was black, not blue, murky and weedy on the edges. But I remember the feeling of being far away and the clean smell of the lake mixed up with the sharp smell of gasoline in the thin, cold air. I remember our boat bumping against the dock and the way it bobbed when we each stepped in.
It’s morning, and I am snug in my bed in a corner of the cabin, and it’s mildewy and dark. Dad is frying the trout we caught for breakfast.
I think of Camp Baird, a big cabin the scouts had on Lake Thomas, one of the little Pend Oreilles. One summer I learned to canoe there, j-stroking all day from lake to lake.
I loved how light a canoe is. How quick to respond. I loved gliding. It was as if everything were mine.
I loved to gunwale-jump: standing on the gunwales in the stern of a canoe so the bow tips up and bouncing up and down to make the waves you then can ride on, scooting over the surface of the water. Flying.
Where I am going, Jesus says, you know the way.