where did you go (poetic friday, week two)

in

I want to send you off to the weekend in the joy of good words, and the better silence before and between and after them. I want to send you off with some of the sounds that paint the world in consonants and vowels. So on Fridays, I'll ramble a bit, and share a poem I've found and loved throughout the week.So, my rambling:Where did you go? Russia, in summer.I drank and prayed against cool marble, tattered flags rippled like ghosts.Kentucky in late May,stung by bees and swarmed by banjos.Antarctica in the heat of a broken heart,sweetly cold and quiet.A thousand places, and none.I am always and never here,flung through life, set freeto wander, lost, away.But if you asked, Russiaor Kentucky or Antarctica with my bleeding heartwere the same:here.And a poem for your weekend, from 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 soulAt 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.