To Throw Away

-- a poem by Chase Twitchell

A smudge of flames takes the twigs,

the dry sisters of the leaves.

It's time to ask for the teachings.

From this high rock I can see

the granite faces of the mountains.

My thoughts are like the smoke

that begins in a heap of oak twigs

and ends diffused in the sky.

There's a Japanese expression,

"to throw away the world."

I can smell the balsams,

resinous in the first long cold.

In my mind I walk out into them.

The sound of boots in light frost -

my breath, feeding the fire of my question.

This short poem is one I am presenting with Robyn Dumont in my Transforming Words class tomorrow. The poem is the result of Twichell being bored with the poetry she had been writing, resulting in her dumping fifteen months' of work into the fire that her husband was burning outside. She grasped onto a new "frontier" for her poetry, answering what she said was the only question that is worth asking, "What is self?" She goes on to say that her test of her writing is how it reveals the mind changed by its mission, to answer the question of self.

Twichell is a practitioner of zen and lover of haiku. The poem, To Throw Away, is written in the form of a tanka: alternating stanzas of triplets and couplets, and alternating nature images with more contemplative elements. (Traditional tanka are written by two people, taking turns writing stanzas.)

I was initially drawn to the form of the poem and its nature images. Later, when I read Twichell's commentary about the poem, I appreciated the transformative impact of her burning her work - literally, throwing away the world of her last 15 months' of writing to reach a new space of centeredness in her work.