A story That Could Be True by William Stafford (1977)

One of my sisters is a zookeeper. At the beginning of her career, she worked in the aviary taking care of the zoo’s birds, and she held a particular fondness for their common raven, Vader. From her I learned that ravens can mimic human speech. She has tales of startling mornings when she’d arrive at the aviary, alone in the still-dark, and hear a creepy voice bid “Good morning.” (For some reason, Vader learned how to greet the staff creepily instead of cheerfully.)

Ravens are uncommonly intelligent, as is my sister, though she is less distracted by shiny stuff. Obviously I love that she’s brilliant, but it made going through high school difficult for me because all of my teachers saw my last name and instantly had too-high expectations. Imagine their disappointment when they learned I was the Loud One.

So when I was thinking about what I wanted tattooed as a reminder of my sister, I knew I wanted a raven feather. But there had to be more to it. It’s not just that she works with birds and is super smart, it’s that she has always made me feel like I could do anything. As a kid, she beat up other kids who got in my way. (Sorry, Tim and Clint, but you shouldn’t have been mean to me.) As young adults, we frequently signed up for various races together, even though it meant she’d be waiting at the finish line for me for, um, a long time. She cited my embarrassingly longstanding belief that Alaska was an island near Hawaii as “a willingness to believe in the impossible.” And she has left me alone with her children, trusting that no one would get maimed or killed. (The ‘encouragement trait’ might be genetic. As I was freaking out about changing the baby’s diaper, her oldest, my then four-year-old niece, perched on the bed beside the changing table and assured me, “It’s okay, Aunt Rachel. You can do this.”) That’s why I like the imagery of the feather turning into little birds and flying away. I see it as a combination of intellect and hope, of knowing what is and letting it launch you into what could be.

OBVIOUSLY, then, the appropriate poem would be Emily Dickinson’s “Hope” is the thing with feathers– here, but I’m just not a fan of her work yet. Instead, today’s poem is tied to the reason behind my tattoo rather than the tattoo itself: my sister. I can sense her in Stafford’s wise words–the endorsement of optimism; the steadfast belief that the most magical parts of my story could be true.

Short Stuff:

• William Stafford got a late start—he didn’t publish his first book of poems until he was 46. (It won the National Book Award for Poetry, so kind of a big deal.)
• He was also the Poet Laureate of Oregon, the best state in the nation.

Topics

Possibilities; hope; identity; family

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A Story That Could Be True

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by–
you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”–
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”

—William Stafford