"Math Trauma" -- by Chase Twichell

MATH TRAUMA

If you liked geometry,
it meant you were a prude.
Girls who liked algebra put out.
The cool girls (I was not one)
sat cloistered, passing notes
and scoring high on tests.

The first time Mom and Dad split up,
kids from down the block and I lit the dry field
behind the development, then with wet towels
beat back the racing edge on the verge of panic
until we were sure it was out.
I always got that feeling from math.

I writhed like a snake over coals
if it came near me.
Mrs. X, drunk the year we did
multiplication and division,
never checked our workbooks
so no one ever saw the horses
where the answers should have been.
That’s when I first wandered off into
the white pastures on my own,
with nothing but a spiky quiver of words
and an urgent question.

--Chase Twichell,
from Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been,
Copper Canyon Press, 2010

"Like a Whole Soul in My Hands" -- Chase Twichell, Her Father, and a Trout

SORRY

I'm to press the pad of my thumb
against the trout's upper jaw,
its teeth surprisingly sharp,
more like berry cane than teeth,
its eyes already beginning to look back
from the afterlife.  It's limbless,
like a whole soul in my hands,
and slimy, so I clamp it
with my knees to get a better grip
and use both thumbs
to force back the jaw until the spine
breaks slowly, like a green stick,
and the jaws half close
as if by failing memory.
Then later in the sink we slit
open the belly, strip out the guts,
see if it's male or female,
see what it's eaten.  If it's female
Dad clicks sorry his tongue.

--Chase Twichell

from Dog Language
Copper Canyon Press,
2005

Passages: Why Read? Why Write?

Here's a poem by Chase Twichell from her Dog Language volume that offers an answer to those questions, at least for me.

NECK EXERCISES

Because I have arthritis in three

vertebrae, I do yoga and lift

small weights. Strange,

what the exercises dislodge:

a Popeye cartoon,

pirates and skeletons--

what's so indelible about that?

Or the way a dog's eye looked

in a painting, how it followed me.

I like the spinal rotations,

the flex in the tree of history,

part green, part stiffened by bark.

It sprouts a shoot of memory,

a line I once abandoned:

all their hope in their shoulder blades--

it came from seeing some fifteen-

or sixteen-year-old girls on a summer dock--

why should that survive? I guess

it's why I'm standing here before you,

pumping the tiny barbells.

--Chase Twichell

Daedalus at Work

"Aptness to purpose: one definition of beauty." --Ezra Pound.

Or, as a different caption:

THE MYTHS

Italy and Greece lay in ruins,

inhabited by beasts: the Minotaur

in his labyrinth,the scrush of his hide

against its walls; the blinded Cyclops

groping for Ulysses among the sheep.

Dad taught us all the myths.

Up on Mount Olympus

people disguised themselves

as animals. It was like that then.

It's not like that now.

Back then you were half animal

if your father was a god.

--Chase Twichell

from Dog Language