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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

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
Wanders
Wander
Bones
Fire
Pain
Lost
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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The fields stretch out in long unbroken rows. We walk aware of what is far and close. Here distance is familiar as a friend. The feud we kept with space comes to an end.
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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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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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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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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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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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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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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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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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.
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I learn by going where I have to go.
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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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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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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.
Theodore Roethke
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
Theodore Roethke