Category: Theodore Roethke

It’s March, aka The Rollercoaster Month: The foot of snow from last week is melting; another six inches are on the way tomorrow; it’s going to be close to 50 degrees next week.

I have to re-read “The Shape of The Fire” every time about this year. The beginning is just so perfect to capture that early spring angst, the mess of the world before it all progresses at the end to high summer and a flower in a vase:

Water recedes to the crying of spiders.
An old scow bumps over black rocks.
A cracked pod calls.

[…]

Shale loosens. Marl reaches into the field. Small birds pass over water.
Spirit, come near. This is only the edge of whiteness.

(Read the whole thing here, since it’s hard to quote from this one–you mostly have to just jump in and go ’til the end, not unlike listening to Richard Strauss.)

My buddy Ted was born today in 1908. His work was one of the first poems I did a close reading of in high school (thanks, Mr. Bickmore!) and I had never experienced anything like it before.

Here’s the end section of that poem, “The Shape of the Fire,” which the close reading told me was about the move from chaos to order (oh, and life? take a hint from that theme):

To have the whole air!—
The light, the full sun
Coming down on the flowerheads,
The tendrils turning slowly,
A slow snail-lifting, liquescent;
To be by the rose
Rising slowly out of its bed,
Still as a child in its first loneliness;
To see cyclamen veins become clearer in early sunlight,
And mist lifting out of the brown cat-tails;
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 drops 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,
As an opaque vase fills to the brim from a quick pouring,
Fills and trembles at the edge yet does not flow over,
Still holding and feeding the stem of the contained flower.

The “weeds” bit is in the first section, but the whole thing is worth reading–all about the move from chaos to order. Water’s big, too, going from mud and bog, to holding life, to supporting a boat with a rower, to the final image of water in a vase “still holding and feeding the stem of the contained flower.” Fabulous. I think of this a lot in spring; the last part in summer, too, going outside in the mornings with “To have the whole air!” in my head.

The Shape of the Fire

There are many birds outside the office. There are starlings, finches who live in the loading dock, a pair of mangy pigeons, and lots of sparrows. I’ve started feeding them (or “creating a dependency,” as C. says) and will bring in stale bread, baking misadventures, or birdseed. The sparrows are the tamest.

I had The Lovely Susannah read the poem today’s quote comes from last night, and while my shipmates scoff at the idea of literature improving your life, she genuinely liked the poem and now wants to read more Roethke. Here’s the quote:

I belive! I believe!–
In the sparrow, happy on gravel;
In the winter-wasp, pulsing its wings in the sunlight;
I have been somewhere else; I remember the sea-faced uncles.
I hear, clearly, the heart of another singing,
Lighter than bells,
Softer than water.

(from “Praise to the End”)

The image caption tells us these are “Sparrows of Palestine.” Our sparrows outside are not from Palestine.

Office Snack of the Day: potato salad.