(The Roetlike'family owned one of the biggest green-
houses in America, a quarter of a million square feet under
glass. Perhaps Theodore Roethke's deep involvement with
nature stems from this background. 'The Father-florist' is
a poem on his father, Otto Roetlike. The son's love for his
father and the slights he suffered by him, slights which a
boy of his excessive sensitivity could not forget, recur in
his poems. So does Otto Roethke's death, which had a
traumatic effect on the poet.
Roetlike suffered his first mental disturbance in Novem-
ber 1935 at Michigan State College. As Alan Seager tells it
in Class House (McGraw Hill), his excellent biography of
the poet, Roetlike, in a rather curious sequence of events,
started drinking heavily-whisky, beer, dozens of cups of
coffee, and swallowing asprin tablets by the handful. On
11 November 1935, while in this state, Roetlike left his
room in Campus Hotel and 'walked out to a stretch of
woods on Hagedom road'. While here, he told Peter de
Vries later, he had a mystical experience with a tree and
learned there the 'secret of Nijinsky.' In The Diary of Vas-
Nijinsky (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1936)
the following passage occurs:
I sat, I sat a long time, then I pretended to fall asleep. I pretended
because I felt that way. Whenever I have a feeling, I carry it out. I
never fight against a feeling ... I went on and came to a tree.
The tree told me that one could not talk here, because human
beings do not understand feelings. I went on. I was sorry to part
with the tree because the tree understood me. (pp. 32-1)
It was a cold night and Roetlike took off his shoes to circu-
late the blood in his freezing feet. He left the shoes there,
walked several miles and hitched a ride back, after finding
himself on the road to Owosso. He took a hot bath. Next
morning he again went out for a walk, and when he landed
in the Dean's office he was delirious.
In November 1949 he had another attack of 'hyperactiv-
ity and disorganized behaviour'.
Roethke's marriage to Beatrice O'Connell in January
1953, and a happy decade that followed, find mention in
my last poem, 'The Season of Light'.)
The Father-florist holds the key;
he makes the rose and orchid pulse,
he brings a flush to canna's cheek,
quickens mildew, moss and scum.
He turns the heat on when he wants
makes steam-pipes and the greenhouse hum.
Humus and heat are what he gives
with one knob-turn to son and flower.
The vine or sapling of his choice--
he simply moves it from its spot
from outer fringes of the cold
to where the air is moist and hot.
Capilarious the winter sap
goes shooting up in branch and stem.
The steam goes up, knocking in pipes.
The father gets up now and then
at night to regulate the heat
and tend the pale-pink cyclamen,
and order his small universe,
the sweet-peas piled on wire and string,
full forty-seven metres high;
and tucked away, beyond the pale
in some vile corner, leaf-mould and manure,
grub and the forward-glistering snail.
The boy can help his father now,
he's old enough to pluck the weeds
that loll and flicker in the dirt
between the concrete flower-beds.
He's old enough to pluck the weeds,
he's old enough to feel the hurt.
Crawling on fours, tugging in dark
on bristly stem with bruised hands,
at one with smells of musk and slime,
while orchid, rose and carnation a
re tended by the father, who
does not know he has lost a son.
An owl-hoot made the night darker.
Mice and worm kept the pebbles warm.
In the stillness he heard a flower
breathe; and sang
as over the iron-grey river
water birds rang.
Didn't hear ghosts whistle or trolls scream,
but heard fish breathe, lungs distended
without the hug of water.
The fish wants to talk, he told
Papa, don't thump it against the boat.
Papa threw it back among the shoals.
In a spray of memories
Papa was rainbow-god.
Then he fell like a shot crow.
Isn't around any more.
Went to the vale of dying birds,
to the creek of the dying roe.
He wished for his return
but Papa had gone. Prayer
unanswered led to loss of faith.
God was someplace else, perhaps within
an unknown cellar
or grotto of crumbling skin.
Walked from empty house to cave-door,
behind which there was nothing;
heard emptiness whine inside him.
His loneliness sensed
where the clouds came from
and where the roots went.
Leaking faucets talked rain.
He heard saplings grow, their joints
snap and crackle. He heard
what he wanted to, had no choice.
River and water rushes spoke alike,
grass and wind had the same voice.
It was the dark way he took,
the one without doors,
as he walked out on himself.
Leaves did not mock him and stick out their tongues
for there were no leaves.
He prayed to snail and worm,
as he walked, stripped of sheath and habit,
disguise and subterfuge, ill-clad
to take the night's brunt. Something
was wrong with the season within.
Fire intrudes here, but his brain
was a wild fire looking for the wind.
All pasts are full of losses,
so was his. He recalled father's face
through glass-window coffin. Hare-guilts, shames,
moles scurried as he moved in. That night
he walked into the woods
alone, where he encountered light
for a firefly-moment, or so
he thought. A feeling had carried him
towards this lambency.
He had followed without remonstrance
this feeling that he was love embodied,
that love itself was some sort of trance
in which the body intervened
and broke the spell.
Keeping the body away from love
is difficult at the best of times.
He beat back the flesh-fires, and froze.
He had come upon a cold clime.
Took off his shoes to circulate
the blood; thought he found the key
to NiJinsky who had come
upon a tree, the bark peeling,
which told the Russian not to talk there
for man does not understand feeling.
Already high on asprin
and alcohol, he thought he saw
the light. Always the vase was tilted
notjust for light but revelation.
If anything filled his urn, amphorae, vase,
it was hallucinations.
A poem like a river moves
from dark to light, a flow
his river was to find.
The ice-filmed waters in him cracked.
He came out shivering wet but whole;
he needed love, he needed time.
Something dark and filmed with damp,
converse with pebble, root and dirt,
are things the dead find in a grave.
The grave and greenhouse were the same
for some dark moments. A light appeared,
a yellow flower squirted flame.
He ran his passions up the mast.
A breeze that came to Dante once
and left him stricken, came to him.
It found him vulnerable, bare.
Her hair took on the blaze of light,
wind took the colour of her hair.
A southern wind, it carried him
with bird and fish towards the north.
The star-wheel turned, he was on course.
The desolations now were gone.
Luxuriating in her flesh
vague stirrings of the soul were born.
Marrow and pulse beat wildly now.
Beneath their movements waters heaved.
But space, awhirl around them, stilled.
Both storm and stillness were the bride.
Their flesh-shoals rocked
to the spirit's tide.
An empathy with dark beginnings
moving to light took hold of him,
the stir of root and bug and snail,
mole-scribble on a text of moss.
It slowly trickled out of him
this sense of lostness and of loss.
He saw his image in another.
The carnal ghost had troubled him
earlier on.
Longing and lust both went along
hand in hand. Earth, light and air
and bird and tree became one song.
He ordered his small universe
of loam and memory, sun-through-glass.
Frost paved it with its morning breath.
(Inside creation seethes and yeasts.)
Later in day light came and knocked:
Eternity was manifest.