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Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.

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
Light
World
Rise
Flesh
Lovers
Word
Fall
Spirit

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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.
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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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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
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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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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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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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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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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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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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In this place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
Theodore Roethke