To the Reader: If You Asked Me

By Chase Twichell b. 1950 Chase Twichell

I want you with me, and yet you are the end

of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms

have become public? How we glance to see if—

who? Who did you imagine?

Surely we’re not here alone, you and I.

I’ve been wandering

where the cold tracks of language

collapse into cinders, unburnable trash.

Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold

of meteors before their avalanches of farewell.

If you asked me what words

a voice like this one says in parting,

I’d say, I’m sweeping an empty factory

toward which I feel neither hostility nor nostalgia.

I’m just a broom, sweeping.

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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