Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963)
American poet who published several volumes of poetry characterized by their rhythm and natural imagery.
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drips sliding from a lifted oar
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward;
To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing.
This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire;
What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.
Bless me and the maze I'm in!
Hello, thingy spirit.
I lived with deep roots once:
Have I forgotten their ways —
The gradual embrace
Of lichen around stones?
The light comes brighter from the east; the caw
Of restive crows is sharper on the ear.
Yet for this we travelled
With hope, and not alone,
In the country of ourselves,
In a country of bright stone.
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
How can I rest in the days of my slowness?
I've become a strange piece of flesh,
Nervous and cold, bird-furtive, whiskery,
With a cheek soft as a hound's ear.
What's left is light as a seed;
I need an old crone's knowing.
I saw the separateness of all things!
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
I’m naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Voice, come out of the silence.
Say something.
Appear in the form of a spider
Or a moth beating the curtain.
Dante attained the purgatorial hill,
Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw,
Shook with a mighty power beyond his will, —
Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw?
All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.
And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene,
The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,
Will turn its private substance into green,
And young shoots spread upon our inner world.
Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.
You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is.
I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow
Upon that God who knows what I would know.