I feel foolish but not old.

I started writing here, trying to lay out my morning thoughts, but poems by Theodore Roethke emerged from the caverns of my mind.

Our father started reading Roethke to me and my brother Pat in the early 1950s, before we were in school. Dad was studying at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. We listened in our bunk beds in a corrugated metal Quonset hut, set aside for married student housing at Iowa after World War II. He started with children’s stuff — I think “Dirty Dinky” and “The Serpent,” though there seems to be a question of when “Dirty Dinky” was first published — but I’ve read Roethke and heard my father’s cadence through all of the succeeding 70-plus years.

I spent the morning reviewing family history, reasons for war against Iran, Russian thinking about Ukraine, controversy over a noisy pickle ball court in the formerly rural Tano Road area, outside of Santa Fe. I have been watching “Foyle’s War”from PBS at night and reviewing discussions with friends about Vietnam, morality and personal decisions. Before bed last night, I thought I should reread Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience.”

I recognize my own shortfalls of discipline, though I still wonder what the amazingly creative British writer Anthony Horowitz, creator of “Foyle’s War,” has that I haven’t got. Was Shakespeare just trying to make a living and golden beams from heaven struck him at the same time? Musician Mark Knopfler, who I listened to and looked up last night, is only four days older than I am but he obviously got beamed, too. Or did they just work especially hard?

I slog on.

It’s taking me a lifetime to figure things out and then there are still more questions. Still, I don’t want to see my remaining years as a race of time against body.

I don’t begrudge Horowitz. I respect him. My humility, probably always lacking, seems to be accelerating with age. I’m glad, though feeling infinitely smaller under the stars.

I hate to think of Roethke as an unsettled soul, especially since he brings such joy to me. So, I say don’t take his poems as all dark. I see light there too.

In A Dark Time

by Theodore Roethke

    In a dark time, the eye begins to see, 
    I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
    I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
    A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
    I live between the heron and the wren,
    Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
    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 a winding path? The edge is what I have.

    A steady storm of correspondences!
    A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
    And in broad day the midnight come again!
    A man goes far to find out what he is—
    Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
    All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

    Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
    My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
    Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
    A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
    The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
    And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

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The Waking

BY THEODORE ROETHKE

by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   

God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

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I slog on under the stars, one foot in front of the other, shaky as I might be.