Theodore Roethke

"My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue. My heart keeps open house, My doors are widely swung. An epic of the eyes My love, with no disguise."

"My truths are all foreknown, This anguish self-revealed. I’m naked to the bone, With nakedness my shield."

"The light comes brighter from the east; the caw Of restive crows is sharper on the ear."

"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."

"He loops in crazy figures half the night Among the trees that face the corner light. But when he brushes up against a screen, We are afraid of what our eyes have seen: For something is amiss or out of place When mice with wings can wear a human face."

"This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, Cut stems struggling to put down feet, What saint strained so much, Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?"

"Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch"

"Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath."

"I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road, As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland; Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance, By pulling off flesh from the living planet; As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration."

"Like witches they flew along rows, Keeping creation at ease; With a tendril for needle They sewed up the air with a stem; They teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep, — All the coils, loops and whorls. They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves."

"The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy."

"Over the gulfs of dream Flew a tremendous bird Further and further away Into a moonless black, Deep in the brain, far back."

"I study the lives on a leaf: the little Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions."

"At Woodlawn I Heard the dead cry: I was lulled by the slamming of iron, A slow drip over stones, Toads brooding wells."

"I shook the softening chalk of my bones, Saying, Snail, snail, glister me forward, Bird, soft-sigh me home, Worm, be with me. This is my hard time."

"Voice, come out of the silence. Say something. Appear in the form of a spider Or a moth beating the curtain. Tell me: Which is the way I take; Out of what door` do I go, Where and to whom? Dark hollows said, lee to the wind, The moon said, back of an eel, The salt said, look by the sea, Your tears are not enough praise, You will find no comfort here, In the kingdom of bang and blab."

"Who stunned the dirt into noise? Ask the mole, he knows. I feel the slime of a wet nest. Beware Mother Mildew. Nibble again, fish nerves."

"Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going, I have married my hands to perpetual agitation, I run, I run to the whistle of money."

"The mind moved, not alone, Through the clear air, in the silence."

"A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait."

"I saw the separateness of all things! My heart lifted up with the great grasses; The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds."

"The wind sharpened itself on a rock; A voice sang:"

"Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear. Renew the light, lewd whisper."

"The wasp waits. The edge cannot eat the center. The grape listens. The path tells little to the serpent. An eye comes out of the wave. The journey from flesh is longest. A rose sways least. The redeemer comes a dark way."

"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 called; The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows; And love, love sang toward."

"To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake's surface, When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island; To follow the drips sliding from a lifted oar Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward; To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing."

"I'll seek my own meekness. What grace I have is enough. The lost have their own pace. The stalks ask something else. What the grave says, The nest denies."

"Bless me and the maze I'm in! Hello, thingy spirit."

"Beginnings start without shade, Thinner than minnows. The live grass whirls with the sun, Feet run over the simple stones, There's time enough. Behold, in the lout's eye, love."

"I take this cadence from a man named Yeats: I take it and I give it back again: For other tunes and other wanton beats Have tossed my heart and fiddled through my brain. Yes, I was dancing mad, and how That came to be the bears and Yeats would know."

"Dante attained the purgatorial hill, Trembled at hidden virtue without flaw, Shook with a mighty power beyond his will, — Did Beatrice deny what Dante saw? All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure."

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go."

"Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how? The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair; I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow."

"Great Nature has another thing to do To you and me; so take the lively air, And, lovely, learn by going where to go."

"This shaking keeps me steady. I should know. What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go."

"I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain!"

"Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: I'm martyr to a motion not my own; What's freedom for? To know eternity. I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. But who would count eternity in days? These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: (I measure time by how a body sways.)"

"Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain, And found out what I could of all desire; I weep for what I'm like when I'm alone In the deep center of the voice and fire.I know the motion of the deepest stone. Each one's himself, yet each one's everyone."

"The night wind rises. Does my father live? Dark hangs upon the waters of the soul. My flesh is breathing slower than a wall. Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love."

"I lived with deep roots once: Have I forgotten their ways — The gradual embrace Of lichen around stones?"

"The moon draws back its waters from the shore. By the lake's edge, I see a silver swan, And she is what I would. In this light air, Lost opposites bend down — Sing of that nothing of which all is made, Or listen into silence, like a god."

"How can I rest in the days of my slowness? I've become a strange piece of flesh, Nervous and cold, bird-furtive, whiskery, With a cheek soft as a hound's ear. What's left is light as a seed; I need an old crone's knowing."

"I have gone into the waste lonely places Behind the eye."

"Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit; Too close immediacy an exhaustion"

"A terrible violence of creation, A flash into the burning heart of the abominable; Yet 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."

"Being, not doing, is my first joy."

"To whom does this terrace belong? — With its limestone crumbling into fine greyish dust, Its bevy of bees, and its wind-beaten rickety sun-chairs? Not to me, but this lizard, Older than I, or the cockroach."

"Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire; What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire."

"I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow Upon that God who knows what I would know."

"Let others probe the mystery if they can. Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will — The right thing happens to the happy man."

"God bless the roots! — Body and soul are one! The small become the great, the great the small; The right thing happens to the happy man."

"And I dance with William Blake For love, for Love's sake;And everything comes to One, As we dance on, dance on, dance on."

"Poetry is not a mere shuffling of dead words or even a corralling of live ones. (p. 89)"

"In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write. (p. 89)"

"There's an element of desperation in the insistence of the graduate student's respect for knowledge — as opposed to wisdom. (p. 95)"

"The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods."

"Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't."

"You can't make poetry simply by avoiding clichés."

"There's a point where plainness is no longer a virtue, when it becomes excessively bald, wrenched."

"You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is."

"Yet for this we travelled With hope, and not alone, In the country of ourselves, In a country of bright stone."