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| Yaroslav Gerzhedovich |
In a Dark Time
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 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.
Theodore Roethke
This poem has been on my mind a long time. Most of us are put off by poems we don't understand. It feels like failure to not grasp what's being said. And yet, I wonder if good poems (it doesn't do to respect a poem too much, like anything, there are differences in quality) aren't purposely intended to be wrestled with. Aren't they a questioning, a puzzling-out-loud? It seems to me that I can enter a poem and walk around, look through its rooms, pick up an object here, wonder why it's there, try sitting in a chair - no, it doesn't quite suit, look out the window at the view from here. The poem seems to be a living contender, an arrangement of ideas I talk to, and who talk back. A construction that either stands when shaken, or falls flat.
So I wrestle with the poem. That first line "In a dark time, the eye begins to see" gets me immediately. Isn't that just how our eyes adjust to darkness? It takes time, but slowly, we begin to make out the edges of things, the shapes of familiar objects - that's the garage, there's the fence-line, oh, the pine tree and the gate-latch. At this moment in life, that line alone (never mind the rest of the poem) captures my experience. I am trying to make out familiar shapes in the darkness. I'm fumbling around, not sure what I bumped into, but, oh yes, I see now - that was here before, but I didn't recognize it.
"What's madness but nobility of soul/ At odds with circumstance?" I'm chewing on that one.
"I know the purity of pure despair/ My shadow pinned against a sweating wall." Isn't it remarkable how an image can perfectly embody a feeling? It's as if there is another language out there, or an incarnation for each thought and state of mind. Maybe that's what poets are doing - fumbling through a dark alphabet- forest, searching for a familiar shape to bring back with them into the light?
What does "the mind enters itself" mean?
And isn't it so true, "A man goes far to find out what he is."?
And then, even though I can't explain why, "the edge is what I have" is dead-on accurate. Maybe it's that I am finally making out the lines of certain objects in the darkness - not the entirety, certainly not the whole.No, the edge is what I have.
Well, it's a beginning.