How Zen Ruins Poets

Chase Twichell

Before I knew that mind


could never marry the words


it loved, in which it lost itself,


in which it dressed itself,


in which it sang its most secret


tender and bitter hymns,


I also loved the thrill of thinking.


Since birth I’ve swum in the clear,

decisive muscles of its currents,


the places where the water seemed


to reconsider its course before continuing,

then the sudden onrush of falls.


I lived inside language, its many musics,

its rough, lichen-crusted stones,


its hemlocks bowed in snow.


Words were my altar and my school.

Wherever they took me, I went,


and they came to me, winged and bearing

the beautiful twigs and litter


of life’s meaning, the songs of truth.

Then a question arose in me:

What language does the mind


speak before thinking, before


thinking gives birth to words?


I tried to write without embellishment,


to tell no lies while keeping death in mind.

To write what was still unthought-about.

Stripped to their thinnest selves,

words turn transparent, to windows

through which I sometimes glimpse

what’s just beyond them.

There, a tiny flash – did you see it?

There it is again!