| ROOT CELLAR | |
| Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a
ditch, Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark, Shoots dangled and drooped, Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates, Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes. And what a congress of stinks!-- Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks. Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath. |
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| ORCHIDS | |
| They lean over the path, Adder-mouthed, Swaying close to the face, Coming out, soft and deceptive, Limp and damp, delicate as a young bird's tongue; Their fluttery fledgling lips Move slowly, Drawing in the warm air. And at night, The faint moon falling through whitewashed glass, The heat going down So their musky smell comes even stronger, Drifting down from their mossy cradles: So many devouring infants! Soft luminescent fingers, Lips neither dead nor alive, Loose ghostly mouths Breathing. |
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On "A Field of Light": One finds in a passage like this what poets call 'an ear.' Each line unfolds into its perfect organic shape, as if no other form were possible. The rhythm grows out of itself much as a tree's leaf and bud unfold from a common root, trunk and branch. One has to go back to Walt Whitman, writing a century before, to find such perfection in the free-verse line."
--Jay
Parini, author of
Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic 
| FROM A FIELD OF
LIGHT |
|
| ...Listen, love, The fat lark sang in the field; I touched the ground, the ground warmed by the killdeer, The salt laughed and the stones; The ferns had their ways, and the pulsing lizards, And the new plants, still awkward in their soil, The lovely diminutives. I could watch! I could watch! I saw the separateness of all things! My heart lifted up with the great grasses; The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds. There were clouds making a rout of shapes crossing a windbreak of cedars, And a bee shaking drops from a rain-soaked honeysuckle. The worms were delighted as wrens. And I walked, I walked through the light air; I moved with the morning. |
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| CHILD ON TOP OF A
GREENHOUSE |
|
| The wind billowing out the seat of my britches, My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty, The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers, Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight, A few white clouds all rushing eastward, A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses, And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting! |
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| ELEGY FOR JANE My Student, Thrown by a Horse |
|
|
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as
tendrils; And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile; And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her, And she balanced in the delight of her thought, A wren, happy, tail into the wind, Her song trembling the twigs and small branches. The shade sang with her; The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing; And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose. Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such
a pure depth, My sparrow, you are not here, If only I could nudge you from this sleep, |
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| From I KNEW A
WOMAN |
|
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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: |
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