Chase Twichell's "What the Trees Said"

Thoughts on the trees.

What the Trees Said

The trees have begun to undress.
Soon snow will come to bandage
the whole wounded world.

When I was young I eloped
with the sky. I wore blue-black,
with underlit ribbons of pink.

I asked the trees
if they would be our witness
but the trees said no.


from Things as It Is (Copper Canyon, 2018)

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It is true. The trees have begun to undress. It happens slowly, I think, until it happens quickly. It’s like how, walking in Central Park the other day, I saw a gust of wind move through a tree, tilting its limbs all at once in one direction before removing a near-countless amount of leaves. They fell the way a blanket falls over a bed. They fell with completion, making what was once the ground something new. There were so many leaves, in fact, that I wondered how so many remained on the branches of the tree. This wondering — it’s a wonder that I wonder so often this time of year. There are so many leaves. And the trees take so long to undress. But they do. And it happens, little by little, gust by gust, until there is nothing left on a branch. Like the world is waiting for something. For snow, some might say. For a covering, some might say. For a bandage to repair this “whole wounded world.” To make it beautiful again.

There is something at play in this poem between the romance of beauty and the pain of loss. There is a tension between a sky that can be “blue-black” and teeming with “ribbons of pink” and a world that aches, one that is bruised and hurt. It’s a tension, I think, that exists every day these days. A tension between beauty and pain. A tension between joy and sorrow. A tension that makes us wonder if even the light of the moon — large and bright and full as it is — can see the pain at work in the world as it illuminates it. Or if it too, like the trees in Twichell’s poem, would rather turn away.

I’ve loved Twichell’s work ever since I first read it many years ago. There’s something about it that distills the strange absurdity of the world into something as compressed as a poem without distilling any of the mystery of the world at all.

Twichell’s poem, “Fox Bones,” reads in full:

To write a poem is to study oneself.
To strip away all but the sinews,
and then the sinews.

A jawbone stuck out of the dirt—
young fox with still-perfect teeth.
I keep in on my desk.

Everything is made of mystery.
And then it all disappears.

Here is a poem that does what I just mentioned. A poem that is so crystalline and compressed, and yet is still full of mystery. Indeed, as Twichell writes — everything is made of mystery.

I think of that when I think of today’s poem. I think of how it takes an acute ear to be aware of mystery, rather than a bored or inattentive one. I think of how, sometimes, poets such as Twichell — those with an attention turned toward the ecological, the mysterious, the natural, the wonder-filled — might be viewed as poets who are too flippant to really be aware, poets who are chalking the world up to wonder but who are not really thinking critically about it. And yet, when I read today’s poem, I read a poet who is thinking so critically that they are willing to say the following:

I asked the trees
if they would be our witness
but the trees said no.

Here, in these lines, is a poet who is radically aware. A poet who understands the damage we have caused this world. A poet who knows that the world, as the recipient such damage, might not want anything to do with us at all. Here is a poet who understands violence, yes. And beauty, too. And the mystery that both exist within.

And from that willingness to dwell within mystery is a real sorrow, isn’t there? It’s a sorrow that comes from frank honesty, a sorrow that comes from listening to the world and reporting back what it has heard.

There’s an essay online by the poet Tom Healy, though it’s not really an essay. It’s an introduction to a reading that Chase Twichell gave at Skidmore over a decade ago. In that introduction, Healy says:

But since [Twichell’s] first book, Northern Spy, there is something else that appears again and again. It is a strange, but common word, a word with less weight and shape than stones and bottles or even dust, but it describes an infinite web of mystery, confusion, awe, and trouble. The word is consciousness, a word repeated in every one of Chase’s books and in dozens of her poems. A sister word, sentience, often treks alongside in these poems of the mind of winter.

Later, in describing how Twichell develops this theme of consciousness in her work, Healy says:

Chase has something more violent to say about consciousness than pain or lies or death. I’ve noticed that when people spend a lot of time among animals, not just the solitary pet, but farmers, veterinarians, people who work in animal shelters, people intimate with the wilderness, they see something more graphic than dying, which has become sentimentalized in our antiseptic age.

The violence that comes to mind isn’t dying, it’s killing. Chase Twichell can make swatting a mosquito or running over a snake with the lawnmower gruesome and maniacal.

That awareness of consciousness — and the sometimes seeming-mundane violence that erases such consciousness throughout the world — is something that unites, I think, so much of the poetry that directs our attention back toward the ordinary in service of a communal solidarity. Here’s a short poem, “Pouring Milk Away,” by Muriel Rukeyser that does the same kind of work:

Here, again. A smell of dying in the milk-pale carton,
And nothing then but pour the milk away.
More of the small and killed, the child's wasted,
Little white arch of the drink and taste of day.
Spoiled, gone and forgotten; thrown away.

Day after day I do what I condemned in countries.
Look, the horror, the waste of food and bone.
You will know why when you have lived alone.

Rukeyser unites, in the same line, what is small and what is killed, and then, later, ties this kind of ordinary wasting to the gross tragedy of catastrophe. Some might say this is a leap, but it’s a leap that a poet can make. And it’s a leap, I think, that a poet should make. Because some has to. Someone has to apply their awareness of the world in a way that allows us to see the myriad ways we enact the myriad things we are capable of across the myriad interactions we have with the world, to see our complicity and our compassion and our violence and our love at work in the smallest of the small things and the biggest of big things. A poet can do that; a poet can listen even if no one else seems to be doing the same. It’s part of the work of attention. Listening, yes. And listening, too, in the places and to the voices that are often forgotten or ignored.

Twichell does this in her poem today, tying together the beauty of “underlit ribbons of pink” with the trees that refuse to “witness” her own joy, in light of all the damage done to them. Even there, in today’s poem, such words — underlit ribbons and witness — are tied together sonically. They are little echoes of the other, these reminders that our beauty and our sorrow can sometimes hold the same sounds.

I just finished reading Gert Hoffman’s “Our Philosopher,” an allegory of a novel (and a NYRB Classic) that details the way a small town in prewar Germany turns against an elder philosopher, ostracizing him day by day until he dies alone. In reading the novel’s appendix, I learned that the philosopher’s name, Veilchenfeld, means “field of violets.” It is no surprise, then, that, by the end of the novel, the man whose name is a field of flowers is no longer welcome in the town. And so it is, I think, with so much else. I think there is a great deal of solidarity among the lost these days. Among the violets and the trees. Everything in between.

In that novel, which is narrated by a child, there still is a great deal of gentleness. Most of this is because of Hoffman’s choice of narrator. The child, Hans, upon meeting the old philosopher for the first time, has this to say:

He wants to, as he says, take us into his confidence, but the necessary words don’t come to him, or he gets befuddled (he says: febuddled).

Lonely and endearing — the portrait of an old man seen through a child’s eyes. It makes the novel all the more heartbreaking, as the child — our little witness — doesn’t turn away from Veilchenfeld’s downfall, but also doesn’t fully understand it. The sorrow at work throughout the novel is that we witness, through the boy’s eyes, all the various people who contribute to the loss of this man, their intentions so clear to anyone who understands violence, which is to say, nearly (and sadly) everyone. And that broke my heart, too. How much easier it can be to understand why someone might want to ruin someone than to lift them up. There is one person — a child — who understands the beauty of this man who is a field of violets. And there is the sorrow of knowing that this child — as many children do — might lose the innate joy and curiosity of such understanding as they grow older, and as they become the adults who approach Veilchenfeld not with curiosity, but with a determinate and dismissive and awful certainty.

I think part of what Twichell’s poem today is asking is not just about understanding and acknowledging a kind of ecological damage that we have enacted upon the world, but also about understanding and acknowledging what it is that we are asked to witness that we should say no to. What, each day, are we made to see that we can — in solidarity with all else who witness — say no to? And how can we say no? Especially now, in an age of climate catastrophe, ongoing genocide in Gaza, repeated political lies, and wildly disparate distribution of wealth — how can we say no to a world that repeats and expands its relationship to tragedy near-daily? And when we turn away from that world, what world will be looking at? And will it be a world where the trees are on our side? And fields of violets? And so much else?

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his newest book, The Message, writes:

To write like this, to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act.

And I think, too, that such imagination of who or what is conquered and colonized can be extended. When Twichell writes of the trees denying to be our witnesses in her poem today, that is an imagination that extends to the trees an ability to say no to us, an ability to be conscious, and therefore suffering. And when Hoffman’s child-narrator sees this old man as someone so full of life, he is the only one imagining such a man as human in a town where no one else seems to think the same.

In his introduction to James Wright’s Selected Poems, Robert Bly writes:

What seems easy for the universe is often hard for us.

This is why a poetry that points out the complex tensions at work in the world is a poetry that feels especially vital. Such poetry reminds us that so many things are difficult, and that part of living does not mean easing such difficulty or erasing such difficulty, but rather just simply seeing it. Difficult work, this life is. Joyful, yes. Hard, often. Beautiful, truly. Painful, too.

And, in his poem that begins that book of Selected Poems, “Sitting in a Small Screenhouse on a Summer Morning,” James Wright writes:

I have come a long way, to surrender my shadow
To the shadow of a horse.

I thought of those lines while standing under a tree this afternoon, watching a few of its leaves fall. I have come a long way to surrender my shadow to the shadow of this tree. What does this mean? I don’t know. But I think, perhaps, it means that part of a life’s work is to reach the place where one no longer sees oneself at the center. I think, perhaps, it also means that such work is hard. It is a long way. A wild journey. An epic of small proportions. And the end of that journey is no great achievement. No. It is, merely though greatly, an act of surrender. Humility. Acknowledgment. But I think there’s something better than this, than all of this, in such work. And I think there’s joy there, too, in such work. The kind of joy the trees might turn to witness.

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Some ongoing notes:

1. As per a post I saw by the poet Niina Pollari, a bunch of presses and people are organizing in support of damage to western North Carolina as a result of Hurricane Helene. You can read the post for more information, and find links to donate here. When you submit your donation receipt, one of the presses involved will send a book your way.

2. I started following Workshops 4 Gaza, an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

3. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.