The inexorable sadness of pencils...

Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate pubic places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

Theodore Roethke

I feel almost guilty for enjoying this poem so much - Roethke's life, according to his wikipedia entry, seems to be full of heartache and catastrophe. He spent big chunks of his childhood in his father and uncle's jointly owned greenhouse - his poetry (though not Dolor) perhaps reflects this. At 15, they uncle committed suicide, father died of cancer. He dropped out of Harvard, taught English at various universities, was expelled from one of them. This was followed by an affair with a fellow poet; he also began to suffer from manic depression, which helped/hindered his creative life. (the constant dilemma) He married a different woman, had a heart attack in a swimming pool, and died at the age of 55.

God. Thankfully it is fairly rare to read one's own orbituaries. (It happened to Nobel, the journalist reported wrote an orbituary about the wrong Nobel - so he was in the curious position of having himself described as the 'creator of weapons of death and suffering', and repented. Peace prize to atone.)