Cocktail Music

In the evenings I'm currently slowly reading my way through an anthology of the poetry of Chase Twichell - I've quoted her before here - I found a large anthology of her poetry at the Oxfam in Alderley Edge a few months ago. This poem seemed especially appropriate as, the evening I read it, we'd just returned from an evening which started with contemplative prayer and ended with a cocktail party (at the same place!) - note the initials of both events! Twichell has made a close study of Zen Buddhism and her poems reflect that.

         Cocktail Music

All my life a brook of voices
has run in my ears,
many separate instruments
tuning and playing, tuning.
It's cocktail music,
the sound of my parents
in their thirties,
glass-lined ice bucket loaded
and reloaded but no one tending bar,
little paper napkins, cigarettes,
kids passing hors d'oeuvres.
It's drinking music,
riffle of water over stones,
ice in glasses, rise and fall
of many voices touching-
that music. Husbands grilling meat,
squirting the fire to keep it down,
a joke erupting, bird voices snipping
at something secret by the bar.
It's all the voices collapsed
into one voice,
urgent and muscled like a river
then lowered as in a drought,
but never gone. It's the background.
When I lift the shell to my ear
it's in there.

(from Dog Language)
And here she is reading Negligent Worldicide (from Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been)

Snow Light

Chase Twichell's Snow Light

I stop, winded, the air sifting down.
Here is the peculiar light I hoped for.
The branches of the pines are lobed with snow,
each shape intact, and brightened from within.

I walked among these flickering trunks in fall,
the grass grown stiff and noisy underfoot,
and found a mystery, a tree, a flowering quince,
all pale and fragrant, out of season.

It gave off this light.
What is holy is earth's unearthliness.
Love, could we describe it,
would break apart, lucency and force.

A starling rasps from his white precinct.
Far back in the woods, the snow is falling again,
perhaps into your life. The wind returns
to chisel its drifts and ribbing.

Forgive the rounded burdens of the branches.
They do not suffer, suffused in this light.
They are not sorrows,
though that is the meaning we give them.

A little unseasonal but thoughtful and moving, from her collection Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been quoted on Carol Peter's poetry blog which is well worth a visit. (I've quoted Twichell's poetry before on this blog go and read some!)