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What falls away is always. And is near.

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
Falls
Near
Fall
Away
Always

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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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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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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still calledThe flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollowsAnd love, love sang toward.
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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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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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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I came to love, I came into my own.
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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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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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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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In the kingdom of bang and blab.
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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
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But when I breath with the birds, The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessings, And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.
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A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
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The indignity of it!- With everything blooming above me, Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses, Whole fields lovely and inviolate,- Me down in the fetor of weeds, Crawling on all fours, Alive, in a slippery grave.
Theodore Roethke