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I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.

Theodore Roethke

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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Gathered
Lose
Loses
Water
Together
Find
Long

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Time marks us while we are marking time.
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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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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.
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So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swamplandDisturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planetAs if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
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In a dark time, the eye begins to see / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade...Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
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Long live the weeds that overwhelm My narrow vegetable realm! The bitter rock, the barren soil That force the son of man to toil All things unholy, marred by curse, The ugly of the universe.
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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What falls away is always. And is near.
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A terrible violence of creation,A flash into the burning heart of the abominableYet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,The burning lake turns into a forest pool,The fire subsides into rings of water,A sunlit silence.
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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.
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Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
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I came to love, I came into my own.
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