What’s Wrong with Me?

By Chase Twichell

From the Summer 2017 Issue

The end of the world

is not what’s wrong with me.

Old age, illness, and death

are not wrong. They just are.

A stone says, Wake up,

exactly this is all there is!

Everything says it—

a sick coyote crossing the field,

poisoned, injured, rabid, old,

the rest of the pack anxious,

yipping and howling back and forth

across the valley as dusk comes on.

What’s wrong with me is that

I find their music beautiful.

I dwell on it long after it stops

and in the silence afterward

I write down its words.

Chase Twichell’s most recent book is Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), which won both the Kingsley Tufts Award from Claremont Graduate University and the Balcones Poetry Prize. A new book, Things as It Is, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2018.