Kim Stafford

Honey, I'm so glad you saw fit to stop in, here at the Memorial Museum, or what I like to call privately, My Mama's Museum. Let's close that door so we won't be bothered by the sun. I love to show strangers these few historical items. I'm so gratef [...]

When Hitler kissed the children and Mussolini played the violin my father planted spindly cork oak saplings in the dust of California because they said this war might never end. "The nation will need cork and wood and shade," the foreman said. [...]

We found a turtle stunned by sunlight dozing easy with half-shut eyes, and as I bent down, my little Rosemary, strapped to my back, stirred and murmured. When I held its knobbed green body up, her quick breath moistened my ear, while the turtle [...]

Find a railway dining car, made into a home that's parked at the heart of Aurora, and a bay horse, one leg raised, asleep tethered to the rail. If you follow Main from there, you'll find the garden open dawn to dusk in the care of Mr. Epp who's [...]

The design of the fingerprint is to hold everything smooth, the design of water to make graceful all it can touch, and we meet here, the quince leaf in hand in the rain. The old tree shrugs in September, a knobbed branch sways, and leaves by fr [...]

Thomas Jefferson Provides a List of Words So That Lewis & Clark May Record the Indian Languages But They Somehow Lose Their Notes After Returning Home Ask of all local inhabitants you meet their own peculiar names for these thi [...]

I found the corner where children ride the worn plastic horse leaping on its post, tail flying, saddle horn dark from sweat, leather reins jingling with chrome—but now so still, so still it made me lonely for a quarter, for a body small enough to c [...]