The Osage Orange Tree (4 page)

As ever, with characteristic graciousness and ease, he transports us to that grounded landscape. No flash, no drama. He invites us into a tough but enticing world, giving us a cadence and atmosphere to bask in—and then we may entertain the questions that bubble up around the margins of his seemingly simple story: Why these particular details? Did he really know that girl? Is she one of those people we all imagine we see, off to the edge of the picture? Did he really wonder about her then, when young, or only when looking back on that precious, difficult, finite time?

Stafford writes the story in compact unembellished increments. Its sections feel like days passing. The boy in the story keeps showing up for work. Always, he shows up.

This could remind us of Stafford's devotion to writing, his lifelong daily allegiance to early morning margins, the horizontal sacred scrawling time on the couch, before he went to work. He knew that showing up for writing would help thoughts and words continue to flow onto pages, rolling forward with mystery and possibility, but always rolling.

In fact, that whole metaphor of rolling text might parallel the rolled newspapers the boy in “The Osage Orange Tree” finds under the bridge, after he has been sent away from Evangeline's house, words tossed aside while still rolled up, unread, under the path they have been walking. Such a stunning, lonesome ending this is—it jolts the reader's breath.

What happens to us? We come so close to connecting. Sometimes, for a short time, when we're lucky, things work out. All of William Stafford's life, he believed there were ways human beings find a hinge among themselves that swings a door wide open. We find a hinge in language and it helps us. Something small but shining—a gaze that joins us for a moment—
words that touch in a new way—a pause in the stream of things—the tiniest unnoticed scrap of presence or beauty waiting almost unwitnessed by the side of any road. Waiting under the bridge, the stories we didn't bother to write. The friends we will never have another chance to make.

Stafford believed in so many potent, magnificent things in his poems, but he never gave false assurance that days or tales would work out perfectly. Rather, he offered the widest, closest, most balanced gaze of any twentieth-century poet. He scanned the horizon and told us the truth.

Characteristically and magically, the Osage orange tree is a silent witness in this story. It stands at the spot where lives do and do not connect: “a straight but little tree with slim branches and shiny dark leaves.” Around it, everything does and does not happen. William Stafford, with his fine instinctive touch, knew just how much to tell.

Now we see that he might easily have been a writer of stories all his life instead of a poet. Maybe his poems were the unrolling of those pages under the bridge.

—Naomi Shihab Nye

William Stafford
, one of America's most widely read poets, graduated from Liberal High School in south-western Kansas at the depth of the Great Depression, in the era in which this story is set. For a time in those days, his father was out of work, and young William's paper route was the only source of family income.

He attended the University of Kansas, receiving a B.A. in English. His career as a poet and educator was shaped by his experience of hard physical labor and by the discipline and cooperative ethos of Civilian Public Service camp life as a conscientious objector during World War II, where he began his lifelong habit of writing in the early hours each day, before first light.

William Stafford published some fifty volumes of poetry, including
Traveling Through the Dark
, which won the National Book Award. In 1970 he was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He taught for thirty years at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, and traveled the world to share his poetry.

Dennis Cunningham
is a highly regarded printmaker with a long history of exhibitions, awards, public art works, and publications, and has taught at Marylhurst University since 1986. According to Cunningham, his work is grounded in “my awareness as a child that I wanted to be an artist. Everything I have done in the past forty years stems from that optimistic vision of my place in the world. I continue to hold that childhood desire: it nourishes me every day I work.”

Naomi Shihab
Nye, a close friend of William Stafford, describes herself as a “wandering poet” and has spent four decades leading writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages across the United States and beyond. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Author or editor of thirty-three books, she is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives near San Antonio's beloved little river.

As part of its hundredth anniversary celebration in 1959, the State of Oregon held four statewide literary contests—one each for the general public and for college and university students, in the categories of poetry and short fiction—and published the winning entries in
The Oregon Centennial Anthology, 1859–1959
. William Stafford won first prize in both of the competitions for the public, for his poem “Memorials of a Tour Around Mt. Hood” and for his story “The Osage Orange Tree.”

This first edition of “The Osage Orange Tree” as a stand-alone volume is published on the occasion of William Stafford's own centennial year, 2014. It has been produced as a collaboration between editor Kim Stafford, artist Dennis Cunningham, and book designer John Laursen, working in concert with Barbara Ras, director of Trinity University Press, and Sarah Nawrocki, managing editor. Torey Browne assisted Mr. Cunningham with the editioning of the original linocut prints. The typeface is Stone Serif, and the paper is Cougar Opaque. The books have been printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc.