Theodore Roethke Quotes

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.

I've recovered my tenderness by long looking;
I'm a Socrates of small fury.
The waves bends with the fish. I'm taught
As water teaches stone. Believe me, extremest oriole,
I can hear light on a dry day.
The world is where we fling it; I'm leaving where I am.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, my shadow pinned against a sweating wall, that place among the rocks — is it a cave, or winding path? The edge is what I have.

The Geranium

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine -
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she'd lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)

The things she endured!-
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.

Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me-
And that was scary-
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.

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

A mind too active is no mind at all. — Infirmity

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

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!

from The Auction

I left my home with unencumbered will
And all the rubbish of confusion sold.

All lovers live by longing, and endure:
Summon a vision and declare it pure.

I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? —

(I measure time by how a body sways.)

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.

from Open House

My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
I'm naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare.

My Papa's Waltz:

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

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.