time in the white light

{jasmine bush, just past 114th st... it sometimes takes me a long time to walk home when they're in bloom, as i am compelled to stop & bury my nose in each one i see}

{more jasmine blossoms... last week. sadly all the petals have fallen now}

This poem, one of the last Roethke ever wrote, is very very good, painfully so -- so acutely descriptive & epic, yet with such sweet little lines, like "What I love is near at hand, / Always, in earth and air." (see part III - my favourite)

The Far Field -- Theodore Roethke

I find parts of it just so (brutally, in places) lovely, it's both sensual and spiritual, certainly the most lovely & poignant poem of coming to terms with mortality. (I'm not one for all that raging against the dying of the light...) Sometimes when I am at my most serene, I can almost feel this kind of peace-making with finitude, with dying, being a little easier -- because of that flash of realization that nothing is really finite at all.

All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, --
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

(Roethke, The Far Field, Pt. IV)

I know this, exactly. & I think the poem haunts me ever more so, because this idea of union with trees & shadows & earth & air reminds me very much of things my father has said to me, on the rare occasions we have spoken about things we believe in.