What Can I Tell My Bones?
(Section 1 of 3)
Theodore Roethke
1
Beginner,
Perpetual beginner,
The soul knows not what to believe,
In its small folds, stirring sluggishly,
In the least place of its life,
A pulse beyond nothingness,
A fearful ignorance.
Before the moon draws back,
Dare I blaze like a tree?
In a world always late afternoon,
In the circular smells of a slow wind,
I listen to the weeds' vesperal whine,
Longing for absolutes that never come.
And shapes make me afraid:
The dance of natural objects in the mind,
The immediate sheen, the reality of straw,
The shadows, crawling down a sunny wall.
A bird sings out in solitariness
A thin harsh song. The day dies in a child.
How close we are to the sad animals!
I need a pool; I need a puddle's calm.
O my bones,
Beware those perpetual beginnings,
Thinning the soul's substance;
The swan's dread of the darkening shore,
Of these insects pulsing near my skin,
The songs from a spiral tree.
Fury of wind, and no apparent wind,
A gust blowing the leaves suddenly upward,
A vine lashing in dry fury,
A man chasing a cat,
With a broken umbrella,
Crying softly.
This poem reads to me like a stranger’s messy room. I hold up a sentence here, a couplet there, look at it a moment, wonder at its proper place, and then end up setting it back on the ground while I examine another. It's a floor littered with sentiment and meaning, strange objects that must be profound to the lodger, all arrayed in patterns suggestive of connections I cannot see.
Is it truly a mess, or did the tenant lay them out this way? What sort of a person lays out such an assortment of oddities? Who sets swan fathers and straw and dead insects all in spiral around a withered branch of pine? What meaning could the missing occupant have ascribed to this jumble?
Beginner. I set a feather back in its place but can’t turn away from the floor and so pick up a dried hornet and just hold it in my hand, wondering softly—perpetual beginner. I don’t know what to believe about this room, about its dweller. I’ve never met him, but I somehow see a balding, portly man in my mind, crescent of bare skin crowned by white, wispy hair, tears running down the crow-footed wrinkles round his eyes.
A cat meows, and I turn my head to see an orange tabby walking nervously, back arched, hair standing up on the end, and then it scampers away beneath a bed that holds a broken umbrella on its surface, arched backwards like an empty cup.
This room stirs something inside me, something sluggish, something small—a pulse beyond nothing, a fearful ignorance. I’ve lost myself for hours here, I realize, and not a thing has been done. My head a-daze, my tongue dry, my body inflamed, my mind comes suddenly to a sharp point around the sad, harsh song of a solitary bird, and I peer outside the window to discover its source, but the bird hides from my view. It cries again and feels closer, closer.
I regard the world outside, a world windy though I see no wind at all—only windy shadows winding their way in slow circles of the late afternoon. And shapes make me afraid. In my eye's corners I think I see lashing vines and gusts of leaves but when I look, all jumps back to stillness. All I can see is the the immediate sheen of an ambient world all twisted by the day’s dying light.
Even sunset cannot save me from the dizzy of disobedient light. The full moon rises, casting darker shadows with its ebullience than daylight can muster and sets a single tree on the hillside ablaze and I suddenly yearn, I yearn, I yearn, but for what?
To dare to somehow be a tree again.
I want so badly for this room—this poem—to make sense to me, to mean something. But absolutes never arrive. In place of meaning, I find only mood.
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