1. It excited me this morning when a package from Better World Books arrived. Two books came: first, some perfect reading for mostly staying at home these days, Ken Follet's 900+ page historical novel, Pillars of the Earth; second, one of my favorite books from all the way back to college, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.
On Sunday, while on ZOOM, I told Bill, Diane, and Bridgit that I had ordered Roethke's book and Bill asked me to explain my love for Roethke.
I stumbled around, perfectly sober, and blabbed some kind of incoherent response.
But, today, as I dove back into his poetry, the reasons for loving his poems started to come back to me.
The memory is a funny thing and mine gets slower and a little less reliable all the time.
On Sunday, as I stammered, trying to answer Bill's question, for some reason one of my favorite of all of Roethke's poems didn't even come to mind.
It's the last of six poems in his series called "The North American Sequence".
It's entitled, simply, "The Rose".
Roethke sets the poem in an unnamed estuary. It opens:
There are those to whom place is unimportant,
But this place, where sea and fresh water meet,
Is important --
With the mind of a naturalist and the music of a poet, he details the sights and sounds of what makes this estuary important. Before long, he comes to the poem's center, its focus. In the midst of all of the motion and sounds of the estuary, ". . .this rose in sea-wind/Stays/Stays in its true place . . . ."
This still rose in a churning world, gives the speaker of the poem a triggering image. The speaker ventures inward and outward, into the world of childhood memory, childhood greenhouses and the father's roses, and outward into the great span of the America, its sounds, to "the ticking of snow of snow around oil drums in the Dakotas" or to the "thin whine of telephone wires in the wind of a Michigan winter".
It's an ecstatic poem, in praise of a world of past and present, of places at hand and those far away that are all connected to each other, interdependent, all anchored by the rose, as if he has found that in a world of great variety and motion, the rose holds all things together.
By the last section of "The Rose", the speaker of the poem experiences a kind of rapture, and brings us into his euphoria:
. . . I came upon the true ease of my being
As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being,
And I stood outside of myself,
Beyond becoming and perishing,
A something wholly other,
As if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive,
And yet was still.
And I rejoiced in being what I was . . .
At the core of his exultation? The rose. Still. Hardy. Rooted. Gathering all about it and all beyond it into itself, a delicate but sturdy emblem of the world's natural and mystical union, its deep interrelatedness.
Want to read "The Rose"? Go here.
2. I slipped on my comfortable Merrell hiking shoes and walked the half a mile or so up to the Shoshone Medical Center for my monthly blood draw. I appreciated how carefully the phlebotomist examined the directions in my blood draw kit, sent to me by a lab in Spokane, and confirmed with me that she understood the details of preparing the return of the box. My blood came most cooperatively out of my arm into the tube and, between us, we got the sample properly marked, packed, and sent back to the lab. By the way, this blood is not tested -- I simply submit a monthly sample to the transplant program's lab each month. If an organ should become available, this sample would be used to confirm that the donated kidney is a good match.
3. Back home, Debbie roasted some Brussel sprouts and combined them with quinoa. Then she sort of said, what the hell!, let's throw in some salmon and cooked up a couple salmon burger patties. I loved how these items tasted combined in a bowl, especially after I seasoned them with Bragg Liquid Amino.
Here's a limerick by Stu:
I've had quite enough of the news.
Can't tell what are facts from their views.
Felt better with Walter,
Huntley, Brinkley din't falter.
Or report only bias as a ruse.
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