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I have gone into the waste lonely places

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
Lonely
Waste
Places
Gone

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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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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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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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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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The self says, I am The heart says, I am less The spirit says, you are Nothing.
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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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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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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 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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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
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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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I came where the river Ran over stones My ears knew An early joy. And all the waters Of all the streams Sang in my veins That summer day.
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What falls away is always. And is near.
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
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I came to love, I came into my own.
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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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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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Let others probe the mystery if they can.Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -The right thing happens to the happy man.
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