In the Lap of a Dream
(from the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke) 1948-1949
This motion is larger than air; wider than water;
Fly, fly, spirit. A strange shape nestles in my nerves.
Whisper back to me, wit. I’m ready to be alive . . .
Don’t go away while I sleep . . .
I feel the eaters watching . . . from across the lake.
The curtain’s no good. They see me even from behind the webs.
You ape’s tail, it’s your crossing time,
You can’t always have a flat path.
Wing-dippers, they’re brushing the bush of smells,
Whoo-ha, it’s Old Harry, he’s begun sewing my cars.
Once he held me over a tub of water.
Lap, lap the wind, and the pond wrinkled.
Is that a bird in the chimney?
I can hear a flower breathing.
There’s a dead leaf scraping around the lilacs . . .
Again, that play of wings, a slow brushing.
Nobody believes me:
They’re coming over the stones . . .
I lay all alone
In the lap of a dream,
Far from the waters
That were my home.
Rocks began flowing
Down my valley,
The ground cried out
My secret name.
Alas, alas, that skin-soft courage . . .
But why, then, all these backward jumps, the mooring by dead water? I had waves and singing birds even on the bottom bough.
Even the stinks talked.
Shapes would sing and withdraw, purest at evening,
In the last afterlight when I lived close . . .
When leaves were alive, I clung tight to the side of a stone.
It never left me, the wall of blossoms.
My nose was never afraid. I blubbed with the eyes of a turtle . . .
How certain the light has become,
The dust has walked out of my house.
How I love this wood, the summery shafts of tomorrow . . .
The waters are breaking with light.
I hear him high in the tree.
The sun, the sun is coming.
I have observed the quiet around the opening flower,
The numinous ring surrounding the bud-sheathes . . .
The point is, dear father, if I don’t stop soon,
I’m going to become a sun-tanned idiot boy . . .
I have basted the meat and eaten the bones;
I’ve kept grandpa from crying into his beard;
All I ask is a way out of slop;
Loose me into grace, papa,
I’m up to here and I can’t stop.
I can’t scratch anymore. My lips need more than a snifter.
Give me the pure mouth of a worm;
I’ll feed on leaves; I’m a knob waiting for the opening squeak.
Why must I wait here, sitting on my hat?
Who else caught the burning bush?
I’m blistered from insights.
Several times I’ve heard the slow sigh of what is,
The moaning under the stones,
And the flames flashing off wings, burning but not consuming.
But then, what happened? I lapsed back into that same terrible calm,
No more than a nose in a grave, the pits of an ugly dream.
Ends, ends, pursue me.
This light leaves me behind.
Something has thickened my sight:
A scared dog cowering in a dream.
Let instinct caper its crooked mile.
I’m just a slavering dog among these lambs:
A man immensely dead, a pair of paws.
My bones, beware. This flesh is settling down
And squeezes what I have . . .
I rasp like a sick dog; I can’t find my life.
Through a web of a dream
My toes are alone, soft in the bog.
Nothing, touch nothing. This is the rat’s change.
I’m lost in my name.
I must be more than what I see. Oh, Jesus,
Save this roaring boy riding the devil’s blast.
My hair grows an inch — I too am a world.
An intense terrifying man: eating himself up with rage.
Such a one as never milked a mother.
You had the answers, eaglet,
Before you left the principality of tears
And stinks: already scruffed with lice,
Knowing the basest life of sticks, the slops
Of air flung by what greasy rains came there.
I met a man, a ruddy deceiver. He went behind
The wind. Pilaster’s me shadow, you known ghost:
Galumphing toward me; a blond and booted jack,
Half-hair, half-horn. I live and I suppose
An angel’s offering. Space dropped me with a sigh:
Egg-headed, bald, a roaring bright behind,
Between a periwinkle and a crass baboon . . .
It’s ha, it’s hay,
It’s jig-jig and jay,
And what do you do with the hindmost?
He was, sleeping, even alone, into more than himself.
Einstein, we’re going up ....
All prior negatives call. The ill partake of this nature,
The full spasm of human nature, not blankness and beauty.
Fhe firs, those heaven-stretchers . . .
My world’s a pillow that retains my smell:
Hell’s neither cold nor hot for the unwell:
The fields extend themselves to please the eye;
I can forgo their bleak felicity;
I would and I would not; all changes greet me . . .
Sighs, sighs had no sequence, I lay among twigs A blinking hulk, a fat man sick of himself,
Waiting behind the weeds . . .
The feeling: you are alone in the room. If you turn around you will not be there.
An uncle: look, he’s groping for the sill,
Clutching at chairs. That’s not enough
To keep him steady. La, la, the light falls.
I’m here alone . . . breathing like a seal.
A sleek nose snoring by a light.
My other self has gone away.
When the owls come I’ll be there . . .
Sweep out to the door,
He can scarcely hold his hat:
The winds wipe up the floor.
Looks, once nature to the eye,
Flee like startled mice;
All the things that he lived by
He must value twice . . .
The pool pellucid by which we sit.
In the end I always return to the same tanks and sheds of desolation,
The garbage cans are still there, and the walls with the ugly blood.
The mirrors are filmy. My neighbor wants to talk about human considerations . . .
I must grow thin, father. Give back my hair and I’ll put some straw in it . . .
Sweet dear, I am away: this thinning tree
Reminds me of myself: who’s left and daft,
We’re all mad . . .
(Arranged by David Wagoner)