We are told to be proud of our nation’s strength, to be independent and strong in our own lives. But when I live my days, I know all that outward pride is a prop to mere survival, not really our way. All pleasure lies in weakness, not in power. Our survival as a species depends on weakness of a winsome kind. By our best weakness, we keep pledging allegiance to this strange dance of longing we call human life. Without this weakness, we are lost. In my own life, I recognize this principle with the following letter to my friends in Washington--not the capitol, but this glorious, ragged, treasured state of being:

My friends,
I have a weakness for little towns, especially in the early morning
when the first gold light touches sidewalk and storefront in Bucoda,
Coulee Dam, Washougal, Forks, Gray’s River, Twisp.
In some sagging trailer on the mountain, where the family left her,
I have a weakness for an old woman trying to tell me her secrets
simply because I am younger, and I am listening.
I have a weakness for the dusty sentiments written, carved,
painted, and stitched on the ceiling of the Wishram Tavern,
for the world’s largest rosary collection in--where is it--
Stevenson? I have a weakness for the youngest dancer
in the arena of dust at Nespelem, and the oldest tree
along the bushwhack path of the Duckabush.
I have a weakness for that restless silver thread of water
meeting land around the intuitive margin of Puget Sound.
I have a weakness for a young boy or girl who falls silent
in the middle of the lesson--not because the answer is beyond
her reach, or beyond his grasp, but because the question
recalls the huge complexity of the world.
                                                                When the news
is dark, and my own spirit falters, I feel weak and afraid.
But then it’s morning, and I have a weakness for mornings,
for my wife, my daughter, the tribe of our friends, and
I have a weakness for that impossible, inevitable work
I don’t yet know is mine.

In that river my blood flowed on.
—William Stafford, 1914-1993

Rub my thumb in the empty hollow of the milkweed pod.
Daddy, listen me into wind. I close my eyes in the Flint Hills.
Daddy, feed me the old family remedy for homesick: sky,
school, girl, ground, find, storm, home, war, scar, farm.
Daddy, by the clink of flint underfoot, butterfly opens
on coyote scat packed with mouse fur, and by the creek
the long-legged spider carries a lizard tail into the deep
mud shadow of a turtle track.

I reach with my hand for what you knew.

Daddy, lead me by bark Braille into the grove at dusk:
honey locust, sycamore, cottonwood, burr oak, catalpa, redbud,
black walnut, Kentucky coffee tree, American elm, red cedar,
red mulberry, hackberry, willow wands in river sand.

Daddy, whisper me home to mangled windmill, Ruby’s grave.
Daddy, at the cutbank where the Kaw camped I can almost
smell your smoke, embers sinking low from a hunting fire.
Daddy, where Kansas rhymes with cousin, heartbreak with home,
C.O. with so long, the prairie wind brings you whispering back.

Turn your head and listen to what I say.

Daddy, my willow stick taps our code at the library step,
refinery flame, river bank, at Hutch and El Dorado,
Ninnescah and Wichita, Garden City, Lawrence,
the Sand Hills, every subtle eminence and declivity
in the open country I can find that whispers Daddy.

They call it milkweed pod. I call it pharaoh boat, ghost
vagina, moon purse, meadowlark songbag, thumb
pillow, yearning’s white mane. Open, the wind
gallops away.

Daddy, Comanche’s farrier scrawled at the end, “In memory
of old Veteran horse Who Died at 1:30 oclock With the colice
in his stall While I had my hand on his pulse and looking him
in the eye this night long to Be Remembered.”

On the prairie alone, I stare into your sky.

They tell me the warriors of the plains valued most the act
of disarming an enemy without injuring him at all, using
the lightest possible weapon. As a feather, you wielded
a hawk’s glance, an owl’s word — Lame White Man,
Kicking Bear, Hump, One Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall,
Rain in the Face, Crow King, Black Elk, Comes Again,
Iron Hawk, Little Soldier, Sitting Bull, Two Moons,
Law Dog, Bloody Mouth, Hollow Horn Bear.

Daddy, I went out over the prairie seeking you, your
softest voice, and Nietsche said, “Some persons
are born posthumously.”

Daddy, I asked the wrinkled mind of the osage tree,
I asked the glance of shrike, asked the restless
seething spiral of the whip snake cornered in a rut,
asked all that travels over prairie: cottonwood scent,
rain damp, tangle of meadowlark and wind, pungent
colors of prairie grass where the sun goes low.

I went out over the prairie to visit a single tree — faint trail
far through buffalo grass, a few frantic minnows where water
had almost dried. Daddy, in the shade of shocked willow.
Daddy, in flint strata where the flood scoured. Daddy,
on the open land a river through the civilized places
shifts and sustains its own, traveling freely as wind,
as dark, as sky — through static human systems
a thicket of the living wild, just there where the field
ends, the cutbank drops away. Daddy, the raveled
edge of all they have made. Daddy, with my hand through
silk dust, prairie grass, milkweed gone how I found you.