Spaciousness, and: Ancient Questions
- Spaciousness, and: Ancient Questions
Spaciousness
I saw it for a second, spaciousness—It wasn't made of air, to my surprise.
Well, saw is misleading. I meanI perceived it as the distance
between the self and the reappearanceof its self-regard, vast or minuscule.
If I could diagram it like a machinein the exploded view—
but of course I can't. And it wasn'tlike anything, unless it was like snow,
the way it falls both disturbedand undisturbed by our lives. [End Page 8]
Ancient Questions
Why must I settle for myselfthe ancient questions?
No one asked me to.
I look up. These leaves are the embersof the peak: darker, more intense, finally
devoid of green, which I find more beautiful.
I choose between them. Why?Are they not a single autumn?
I see that all questions collapseinto one, but what is it?
Why do I still not know its words?
The cold brook of striving talks to me at night.It says, Wake up. Stop doing anything else.
Is that a calling? It's not an invitation. [End Page 9]
Chase Twichell's most recent book, Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2010), won the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. A new book, Things as It Is, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2018.
