The Dream
Dreamed before 1958 by Theodore Roethke
1
I met her as a blossom on a stem
2 She came toward me in the flowing air,
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3
Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
4 She held her body steady in the wind;
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--Theodore Roethke
EDITOR'S NOTE
This elusive lyric was published in 1958. When was it dreamed? Was it dreamed? Roethke's former student and editor, David Wagoner, who's plowed through a good twelve linear feet of the poet's notebooks and loose papers, found that Roethke, especially in his later years, worked by accretion and concretion. This poem may tell a dream, or four dreams, or a jumble of dreamlets, or a mixture of dream- and waking images and lines, all floating in the notebooks and on paper-slips for years before crystallizing into this form.
So is it a dream? And of whom? Roethke's dead and not telling. Still, this whatever-it-is is quite compelling.
--Chris Wayan
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