Hunger for Something

By Chase Twichell b. 1950 Chase Twichell

Sometimes I long to be in the woodpile,

cut-apart trees soon to be smoke,

or even the smoke itself,

sinewy ghost of ash and air, going

wherever I want to, at least for a while.

Neither inside nor out,

neither lost nor home, no longer

a shape or a name, I’d pass through

all the broken windows of the world.

It’s not a wish for consciousness to end.

It’s not the appetite an army has

for its own emptying heart,

but a hunger to stand now and then

alone on the death-grounds,

where the dogs of the self are feeding.

Source: The Snow Watcher (Ontario Review Press, 1998)

Biography

Chase Twichell was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and has lived for many years in the Adirondacks. A practicing Buddhist, she is the author of several books of poetry, and her work often reflects her spiritual practice. Introducing her collection The Snow Watcher (1998) to readers of the Washington Post, poet and critic Robert Pinsky describes the poems as “full of sharp observation, both of the world and herself, unsentimental . . .

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