Songs from a Spiral Tree

I’ve taken my title from the poem “What Can I Tell My Bones?” by Theodore Roethke:

“…O my bones,
Beware those perpetual beginnings,
Thinning the soul’s substance;
The swan’s dread of the darkening shore,
Of these insects pulsing near my skin,
The songs from a spiral tree….”

I first read this when I was in college and the words have stayed with me.  I can’t say that I know what they might mean to anyone but myself.  They remind me of Yeats, and not merely because of the swans.  There is something koan-ish in Roethke’s verse: infinite and precise at the same time.

I’m not especially well-read in poetry, but I have my perennials: Dickinson, Bronte, Yeats, Roethke.  I don’t really need to “know” what a poem means if it strikes a chord, so to speak.  Poetry, for me, lives on the boundary of heart and mind, like music.

PS I have no connection to the Spiral Tree Grove Church of the Earth, which happens also to be located in Rhode Island.