This is a story about falling in love with the prairie, a landscape I was not predisposed to like, much less love. For I have spent my adulthood in a succession of beautiful places – by the sea, in the mountains, in the high desert of northern New Mexico, on a bluff overlooking Puget Sound, in a New England village. When I moved to Iowa, in the summer of 2000, with my eye accustomed to striking vistas and the picturesque, the rolling fields of corn and soya beans did not impress me. Nor did the heat and humidity lift my spirits. So I threw myself into my new job, and it was only in rare moments, when I stopped to consider my new surroundings, that I realized how removed I felt from this portion of creation. Despair came over me.

This should not have been the case for someone who grew up in New Jersey. Indeed I had often joked that after such a childhood every place looks more interesting. But in fact I was raised in a rural setting, far from the refineries and factories along the turnpike, the sight of which leads many drivers to speed through the Garden State. (The nickname comes from the truck farms that grow fruits and vegetables.) Mine was a dairy farming village, which was rapidly developing into a bedroom suburb of New York City – a cloud on the horizon as I caught box turtles, garter snakes, and rabbits; fished for suckers in the stream below the abandoned railroad tracks; threw sticks into the quicksand beyond the baseball field; dug in the earth for mica, the amber leaves of which I held up before my eyes to watch the blue sky turn gold.

What attracted the first settlers to the area was not gold but water – tributaries of the Raritan and Whippany Rivers, which in the eighteenth century were lined with iron forges, textile mills, sawmills, gristmills, kilns, a distillery. In the woods near my house were culverts and tunnels, tailraces and millponds – legacies of an industrial revolution, which ended soon after the Civil War, about the time that the Rockaway Railroad was completed; its trains ran for just twenty-five years before it shut down, a victim of the larger factories and mills in Newark and Passaic; in the First World War its tracks were removed for salvage. But the farmers continued to prosper until, in the 1960s, developers began to buy up their land. Of the twenty-five farms in operation when my family moved there, three remained when I left for college fifteen years later; only a handful of the children I grew up with stayed, the median price of a house having risen to half a million dollars. What was once a pleasant mix of farmers, blue collar workers, and business commuters to Manhattan has become a sanctuary for the rich and the famous.

But what I remember now is the decision made by the community to establish a natural refuge called Dismal Harmony – almost 100 acres of woodland named after the pair of streams coursing through the property, Dismal Brook and Harmony Brook. It was the first parcel of land set aside in the state's Green Acres program, a prototype of the Nature Conservancy's efforts to preserve special places, and the village has since set aside 3,500 more acres. The word dismal is rooted in the Latin dies mali for evil days, and Dismal Harmony is associated in my mind with tragedy – an overcast day in autumn, the last leaves clinging to the trees, the news that a neighbor boy had accidentally shot his cousin whirling inside me. There is something dismal about any harmony we discover: we know it will be short-lived. Which is why some writers describe their work of celebrating the natural order as elegiac: what they love will pass, hastened by the destruction wrought by mankind. But this knowledge propels them to search for beauty everywhere, just as among the ferns and ledges and dogwoods of Dismal Harmony I discovered arrowheads left by the Minisink Indians, long since driven from the region.

Which is to say: when I moved to Iowa I should have known that the forms of beauty in nature are infinite. Instead of pining for the sea or the mountains or the high desert, I might have opened my eyes to the wildflowers growing in the ravine behind my house; to the swoop of the night hawk and the song of the mourning dove; to the mist rising from the river at daybreak. Yet it was not until I attended a reading by the poet Jane Mead that I first glimpsed a way to love this place. She teaches in North Carolina, but maintains a house outside of Iowa City, which is a locus of some of her best work. In her suite, "The Prairie as Valid Provider," the concluding poem of House of Poured-Out Waters, she weaves together a broken relationship, an earthquake in San Francisco, a mosh pit, and the prairie. Here is the first of its seven sections:

Occasionally, I start from scratch.

Scratch for me is the prairie
and moonlight is my favorite season —

white when it lies,
white when the rain pours over,
white when it doesn't.

I can hear the sheep crying
in the driving rain — lightning
catches the world as an image
might catch history.

Then the prairie goes on
a long way, and it looks
like the sheep are just grazing.

Rot enters the rolled hay.

Suddenly I realized that I too had to start from scratch – to wean myself from a taste for the grand and see anew. And isn't this what we demand of poetry – a fresh view of the matter? But this becomes more difficult with every passing year, with every obligation destined to cloud our vision, which is why we turn to poets: to remind us of the glories outside our window.

For our walk in the sun is brief, and even if we long to be elsewhere we know we have little choice but to make our home where we find ourselves. Such is the import of a short poem by William Stafford, a broadside of which hangs from the wall by my desk:

Note

straw, feathers, dust —
little things

but if they all go one way,
that's the way the wind goes.

Poems are made of little things – syllables, words, phrases, rhythms, impressions. And Stafford was a master of the quotidian. He spent his professional career in Oregon, but his poetic sensibility was forged in the long views and winds of his Midwestern childhood, in the civilian public service camps he worked in as a conscientious objector during World War II, in the apprenticeship he served in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He traveled widely in this country and abroad, and while he averaged a poem a day, publishing more than sixty books in his lifetime, nevertheless he confided in his journal that, "Every day something keeps me from the main business of my soul."

Little things. The sound of ice cracking on the river. A patch of snow at the bottom of a hill. An owl perching on a fence post. Tassels of corn fluttering in the wind. Soya ripening in the late light of autumn. Of such stuff are poems – and lives – made.

Stafford spells this out in "Places with Meaning":

Say it's a picnic on the Fourth of July
and all of those usual at the end of the day are there.
While they look at each other they become old,
and from the dark wood of evening a heron
rows forward across the path of sky left
in the west, through the still air.

All of my life I have noticed these appropriate landscapes
where events find their equivalent forms: oftentimes
I see trees hunching their shoulders, leaning toward me,
Because in the past I have neglected what I should have done;
or a dog hurries forward to lick some hands, and all
at once I see how frightening: they are mine.

There are people who always belong wherever Earth brings
them and gives them over to the practices of the wind;
more slowly, but caught in the same pressure, the rest of us
too, by the end of our days, learn to lean forward
out of our lives to find that what passes has molded
everything we touch or see, outside or in

Stafford's poetics may be described as a continual exercise in giving himself over to the practice of the wind as it courses over the land – wherever he found himself – and through the language. When I first met him he had just finished a reading tour of Texas, during which he was asked if he had written any poems about Texas.

"No," he said. And then he got a twinkle in his eye. "But by God if I didn't get one the next day."

His ease with his materials disguises a profound insight into the creative process: that it depends upon the artist's willingness to surrender to his or her materials. We are indeed molded by what passes – in my case by the trickling waters of Dismal Harmony even more than the changing colors of the aspens in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains – and the wonder of Stafford's poetry is the steadiness with which it registers the various worlds he inhabits and imagines into being. He wrote his final poem on the day he died – inspired, his son Kim suggests, by a phone call:

"Are you Mr. William Stafford?"
"Yes, but . . ."

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.
That's when sunlight came from behind
a rock and began to follow my hand.

"It's for the best," my mother said – "Nothing can
ever be wrong for anyone truly good."
So later the sun settled back and the sound
faded and was gone. All along the streets every
house waited, white, blue, gray; trees
were still trying to arch as far as they could.

You can't tell when strange things with meaning
Will happen. I'm [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. "You don't have to
prove anything," my mother said. "Just be ready
for what God sends." I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.

Well, it was yesterday. And the sun came,
Why
It came.

"It" is the world – sunlight and stars, the wind and waves, love and loss. And because we can never know when the world will turn strange with meaning and why at the edge of consciousness we may hear a dismal harmony, we must keep our eyes and ears open for this untold story, which is the story of our lives. Stafford's last poem is written from the beyond, and this is why I take comfort in his assertion that, peering into the abyss, he remains faithful to his vocation, a scribe recording the signals – the story – the earth sends him, even as it prepares to bear him away. His mother was right: he must be ready for what God sends – as indeed we all must.

This summer, for example, during a tornado watch, I kept a vigil by my back window. My wife was abroad, my daughters were asleep, and I was trying to gauge when to take them to shelter down in the basement. The white oaks in the yard were bending in the fierce winds that had already laid waste to parts of Cedar Rapids. Lightning flashed continuously, the sky was bright, the branches dipped over the fence. I remembered a moment – an image of what Jane Mead might call history unfolding on the prairie: The snow was melting in the Rochester cemetery, one of the last patches of prairie savannah in Iowa. A botanist, explaining to a delegation of Vietnamese writers how the prairie had all but disappeared, pulled up some non-native grasses. The visiting women picked their way through the mud, in their long silk robes – red and blue and white. Here were our former enemies studying the gravestones of the pioneers, learning the names of native grasses and wildflowers that have, against all odds, survived: bluestem grass, asters, shooting stars... In the white light of the storm I went to check on my daughters.

                                                                  •

Jane Mead's poem is from House of Poured-Out Waters. Copyright 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the poet and the University of Illinois Press.

"Note," "Places with Meaning," and "Are You Mr. William Stafford?" copyright 1970, 1982, 1998, by the estate of William Stafford. Reprinted from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota.

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