This New Doubt

Poems 2005 - 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:30:00 +0000

All of these poems were published in my chapbook Sackcloth and Ashes (2008).

Naming Things

We did not know what waited. No one

but us and those trees. You wanted to teach me

the names, to show me a spring. You even saved

my drowning dog! Slipped so easily

into the glove of hero. But I could feel

your caution harden as we stepped close,

the way your air grew heavy

and clenched, like a shell you couldn’t

discard. How the womb of your mind

turned in on itself, snug in its woolen

fear. Couldn’t you see how singular, how

auspicious that moment? Couldn’t you choose

just once, to be brave? Nothing could wedge

a gap between the rings of your life, so tight

and deafening, a border-patrol psyche.

The decision of a man to flee.

There was no place for us to go that day,

that time. I draped my arm around you,

asked of your ancestors—willed you

to turn my way, to seize a chance

forever. You were unreachable. Yet time,

all that time, and I still stand, one arm frozen

around you. You flew in the manner

of a bird. You can return in the manner

of a bird—my arm outstretched for miles,

for months. You can gather courage.

You can gather courage.

I will teach you the name for this.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Almost Healed

Winter, I drop by.

Your home a roman catacomb, you subdued

with a cold, awakened

at evening, eyes and shoulders a droop

of defeat, let down by your body—that refuge

from emotion, humanity, sexuality. We sprawl

on the floor before your fire, drink tea.

No, I sprawl. You sit upright in a stiff-

backed chair, at first. The more stalwart for all

your desire. We tell stories as slowly

you fold. The weight of reproach like a yoke lifted

as you slip into a stretch on the rug.

The change at once familiar, at once so charged!

Your old transmutation: dread blue to

vermillion. You are Ireland; it is spring;

trees are dancing. I remember this.

Your stories: Childhood—you were small.

Stuck in a ditch on a day so hot boots

melted to your feet! Or how you took that old

donkey out for a spin! I had never seen

you laugh—not like that. Had never seen

such joy, such resurrection on your face. You shone

with the newness of a thousand infant tears.

It was almost birth. You almost believed.

We were almost healed.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Premonition

I saw a vision of us in the way

I sometimes see things. Before I knew you.

Was it a heart’s way to know loss,

to prepare for its arrival, or was it a finger

pointing—go there? All I know is I came

to love you. More than I had loved

as a woman, I came to love you.

You were washing a truck. I stood

at a window. A bell tolled on the plain

of premonition and I let stones fall

that led me to you, adrift on fate,

particles of gold in a windstorm.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Confluence

You made the ocean more beautiful,

the downy light, air draped and wide,

unearthly ground beneath my feet. All more

luminous beside you. You wore your blue

hat, a fleece vest and sneakers, ran with

your dog, soccer-kicking a bottle to

fetch. How you looked, boyish and blithe—

a masterpiece against that radiant scrim.

I told you your smile was the most

beautiful thing in the world to me, and you

closed your eyes, shook your head no,

told me to look around. The typical

deflection. I tried to keep from holding you,

from building a future out of nil, but just

to be there, sand shifting under foot,

sea-air in my lungs, you breathing beside

me. We turned back where mammoth stones met

headland, dwarfed by the cliff before us. A

confluence of water, sand, rock, and painted earth.

We had walked to this place many times, a place

so beautiful, where we always turned around

and walked away.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Mornings

On mornings I wake slowly, time not yet

a rattle at my ear, the whispers of this house

enfolding me. I rest in a pretense of light

and dream you to me. Tall twin bed,

body aloft in a sling of comfort, waves

pulling me in and out of sleep as love billows

and quakes—my heart a thin sheet on a line.

Some note of hope turned loose

in your voice, some unguarded look,

the feel of your nose rubbing up and down

mine. I am that sheet, lifted and shaken,

lifted and shaken.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Hands

I had never done that. Stopped

mid-sentence and asked, Can I pray?

We sat on driftwood under a cupola of

stars, squatted at someone’s abandoned fire,

and where I took your hand, we blazed.

Eyes closed I prayed—no words,

no sound, holding you up to the being

burning inside of me, to the hand

of the universe outstretched like that

of a woman caressing a child’s head as it

leans, soft and sweaty, against her leg.

Sackcloth and Ashes

Lift the sackcloth of midnight

and find me, like bread rising for the morning

meal, old dormitories of longing

adorned for laughter’s revival.

You are not so famished you cannot

eat. Not so tired your hands can’t ring

the dawn bell. Your heart, even sleeping,

shakes the rafters. Ashes of old lives—

let the wind take them. I smell sweet-peas

on the breeze blowing in. The whole

night, full of one blossom’s scent.

While you were drifting, musicians have tuned.

While you were crawling, the dreary sky opened,

a stippling of stars, and wrote our names.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Severance

You came to my play. The playwright’s date,

a role you anticipated like wearing a cilice.

The sore thumb—your vision of it,

as if the lack you saw in yourself would blaze

across your face like a banner ad: no papers,

no college, no status. I made you come.

I would wear you like a string of pearls. I

wanted you there, wanted to share

the time with the man I loved, love.

Did you already know what you would do

the next day? That it would be the last time

I would see you for months? Your face alight

when you greeted me. Your embrace

enveloped me and you held my hand.

Had you planned it ahead—your last parting

gift? My severance check?

I held you on my arm as we departed,

bathed in a swath of moonlight. This

is bliss, I thought, not knowing that moment

was all of it. En todo. The last note before symphony’s

end, a strain pregnant with the power of the whole,

yet mournful. Applause swells,

a volcano of longing, beseeching, beckoning—

the cycle of ovation and encore. You hugged me,

fervently as your greeting, and when we kissed

I saw your eyes milky

with love. Shoulders parted, then arms,

then hands. A slow rending. As if we both knew

it was not just goodnight,

but goodbye.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Moon Poem

Friday night, one week till Christmas.

Alone with the moon, full

outside my window. Moon, ardent

love of a grandmother’s, great-great-

grandmother’s ghost—sacred, timeless

entourage, ripe seeds of joy.

I pull a string, extinguish my lamp,

sit with the moon one hour, face

upturned. Wind beats my house

like a widower drumming his wife’s

still coffin. But I am content.

No place I long to be. No face

I want to turn and see

but the moon.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Centered

I carry you with me into that light,

bread of the masses, silence of ages

you ingest, invest through me.

The cave at my center, like cupped hands

before a fire, holds you. My finger traces

your outline on my skin and you are there.

I can see your listing gaze, the hunger at the base

of your taut throat, the graces looting your knapsack

of tortured remembrances. We will take them—

they say, they will be gone, extinguished like a star.

Breathe with me, look around.

You are already there.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Walking, Coldest Day of the Year

The sun loves days like this, seen

in a million new ways, each blade of grass

tipped with a diamond, light refracted

into myriad forms of honor. Whole fields

of crystalline white, patched in chartreuse

here and there, where the sun went too

far. Puddles frozen and thawed, froze

again into expressionistic layers, pod

forms overlapping, concentric circles.

I pass the woman I met at the Bookmobile,

and she waves through a window. My dog

crunches brittle turf under calloused paws,

and runs over threads of moss lacy with

frost. My mind lies resting in a small

pocket, future and past dissipate like

tendrils of smoke, and you are closer to me

than my skin. I hold you inside me

like a Russian nesting doll, and when I stand

at the creek, I know you hear its trickle

and roll. When the love all around shakes me

like breath on a reed, I know you feel

the vibration. Loving a blade of grass is

loving God, and loving God is loving you.

You are a fish. Love is water.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Poems 2004 - 1999

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:19:00 +0000

A few of these poems were published in my memoir Jesus Loves Women: A Memoir of Body and Spirit, a few in my chapbook Sackcloth and Ashes, and a few in literary journals. They are roughly arranged in reverse chronological order.

Profligate

Just look how we circle, a flock

of gulls, vying for love like a tear of fish.

Arched backs, dreadful necks outstretched,

shrieking our greed cries. When

I look this way, ask me when love has

run out on me. Remind me how it clings

like manna to the soles of my feet, how

love, like a dandelion, blankets my fields.

Love, that keeps knocking me down and

pulling me up, that makes me naked

and poor, and always full. When fear

blazes in my eyes, take my hand, fly me

like a ghost above my life, to the places

love has crumbled battlements and raised

the dead. Be profligate with love, tell me,

and it will astound you. Spend it all.

Now. Go.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

The Wind Blew So Hard

this New Years Day,

foam tumbled in billows on the beach,

sand clung in small peaks to grass—

sad, last-ditch efforts, barbed

sacraments of intransigence.

Walking home, I thought

of Saint Teresa, flirtatious young

nun, old reformer of orders,

keeper of a woman’s mystic

secret. When time came to quit

la vida vieja,

preening chatter of parlors,

swaying vanity of youth, did

it come as a stroke or a gale?

A whisper or a shout, fierce

and adamant? Did the raven-haired

beauty wake to stillness, or to a man’s firm

hip on her dream-tossed mind,

equatorial pull unyielding? This new

year comes like a winnowing.

Corruption slowly unbraids

from glory before my eyes.

Dead leaves stagger while sea birds play.

Hillsides crash, and still,

the gulls rise.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

What’s Left

And then there was only the bird left

singing in my tree, and the scent of clean

clothes in a basket. There was the timbre

of compassion in my friend’s still voice,

and the scent of curry simmering on my stove.

There were the children who stormed the mad-

chilling sea, and the mist that sprung curls

in my girl’s hair, the caress of a velvet throw,

scarlet and sueded like a heart, and the blue

eyes of the woman who took my hand.

And then there was only a piano tune

nodding on a breeze, and a steaming bath

to lie in, a vase of wild roses

and water to wipe my tears, and the last

light on elms trees in evening. And then

there was only the waves’ mystical hum,

a pelican vee making shadows on the sand,

and at bedtime Ashokan Farewell played

mournfully, like a dream, on a fiddle

in the room down the hall.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Rose Light

It is early May, and 82 degrees at 8

PM. Rare spring night for this coast

town. Even the waves reach

my room, its windows spread open

like a heart, the roar carried on the wind

with the lilt of birdsong, the swell

of chimes, and soon, you.

The rhodie by my deck has bloomed,

and you tell me its the largest in town,

standing under the tree—2 stories high,

30 feet across, a riot of fleshy-pink

poms. I know, I say, but don’t tell you

how, in the morning, the sun on that

rhodie turns my whole room rose, casts

amber light on my bed, sweet-

smelling still of you. I don’t tell you

how that light is an omen, an

echoing symbol. I don’t tell you this

is the rosiest springtime of my life,

my spirit prone like a golden poppy,

body released of its lonely ache,

as your fiery arms enfold me,

as your strong, dark fingers loosen

the last knots of my heart.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

She Took the Name Nancy

Great, great grandma was a Ute.

Obsidian hair, long and loose down

her back, bare-ankled beauty, buckskin

dress and nothing underneath. Shame

to my Victorian-white relations who forgot

her. Her husband, their rebel-white son,

“went native,” lived on a rez till he died, long

after her young passing, after the birth

of my great-grandmother, who he also

outlived. My Ute grandma, casting long

native shadows where remembrance should be.

She would have believed her grandmas’ spirits

hovered where she walked, spoke to her.

But if she has spoken to me, I have not listened.

Now I listen and wonder, look for her in the curve

of my face, ever-turned to the wild, in the hump

of my nose, my summer-brown skin. All

I have are her drops of blood in me, a census

scrawled “Nancy”, my Nana’s firm word.

I cannot dance the Ute Bear Dance or say

my great, great grandmother’s prayers. Too much

stolen already—by white men, by white women

like me. No, I will honor her in my bear-hug

embrace of the living, in bearing the sag

and softness of body and soul. No white-

woman corset-consciousness for me. I have

her blood in my veins—a thin thread

coursing through me like the Rio Grande.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Iraq

I imagine you a desert flower,

succulent and needle-sharp

on the cracking white earth. The color

of mango, or a woman’s wet lips.

I imagine you a man pinstriped

and proud at his first daughter’s wedding,

eyes shot red with joy

and loss. I see you as lovers drawn deep

beneath the surface, as mortars storm

outside their room, unheard.

I imagine you a boy slipping bread

to a small, ribbed dog, or a woman placing a date

on her husband’s steady tongue. I see you

as old friends—hands entwined—step

by step on a rock-strewn stream.

You are a tall cedar, Iraq, a heart beating

beating in a body wracked with pneumonia.

I will imagine you in your many groves

of love until the time you are free, free

as the night you first learned to dance.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Steam

Just look at her

gyrate and curl in this

shard of still light.

Daughter of Herodias

hovers over my cup,

puckering tornado lips,

spinning toward bliss.

I cannot take my eyes from it!

Brisk circus of distraction,

sweating, dipping,

siphoning thought. Blank

document on my desktop,

lifetime of poems left

to write. Yet the light

invades and I,

dizzy as a moth,

rush headlong

into surrender.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Sleep and Waking

I love how you looked,

stepping from the car with your cat

dead in a veterinarian’s box. All your

beauty in pained eyes and bent

lips. Long hug on the driveway, next to

where she lay on the hood, rigid in her

cardboard casket. Your sobs released

like the scent of lavender in fresh fists,

or unearthed tales long-buried in the droll

silt of genocide. How it feels to feel.

The tears I would replace with passion

or joy. But I’d keep the tenderness,

the soul’s deep hammock of longing.

This is how it feels, can you see?

Months later, into surgery with you.

Skateboard injury. One more round

of anesthesia, you — a stone blissfully

rolled away. I imagine you before

the traumas that folded your heart

like a fan. A boy alert to nightmare

and dream, crawling to mother’s bed

full of ghosts. The tinsled autumn

before numbness set in and over-

took you. Your doctors, so gentle,

ushering you to the velvet state

I can never attain. The drugs you once

saved for rainy days when my wild

heart and blunt-truth ax struck deep

beneath the layers of sleep. The bed

of my love, no comfort. Slow tearing

asunder, the one dry wound that

somehow you manage to feel.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

The Smallest Birds

A terrible awe as I watch the smallest birds:

lesser goldfinches, firm as fists,

the hyper hummingbird, the field

sparrows, pressing love on my heart

like a brick. Oblivious to need,

they tilt their button heads, “How

interesting this, how interesting that.”

Toothpick legs, wings twitching like

boys on a playground. Last week

I found one half-breathing, near-dead,

chest heaving like a flag on the sky.

Eyes open and terror-stricken.

I wanted to save him, at least

give him one finger-tip whisper.

But his pebble-eyes folded in

a cradle of new spring grass.

Sadness catches up to me.

I do not want to die.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Cleave

Terrified of empty house, day’s dark end,

the cold recollection of being left, you comb

our married minutes for seed. The faint premonition

of flower stroked and sprinkled, served tea

in bed, filled to the moaning brim of ecstasy. Last

night I tried the bourbon you never used to drink,

cried with you till eyelids swelled, woke to passion’s warm

hand. As I stripped damp sheets, you said

I make you happy. (A thread of wood-smoke stitched

the air; Fall’s rent shawl draped our home

in frost and light). “And sad,” I added, to balance.

Our days fill with could-be-lasts—pumpkins carved,

fallen leaves raked. Hope settles in you each night

like fog, and burns away by morning, as daily we

cleave. I split and you hold, I sever, you join.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

When Summer Came in 2002

My daughter and I carried the spare table out

back, began to live under green and blue.

Spent our days nourished, and noticing things.

Like the flamboyance of a single tiger

lily against the foxgloves' purple foil,

or the way just-fledged finches played like

kids in a fountain as the soaker-hose

drenched their twitching wings.

As men in faraway places carried their

deaths onto buses, in bombs strapped to thighs,

we sought the golden lilt of the monarch.

As soldiers bulldozed refugee homes,

ate food stockpiled by the occupied,

we absorbed the tickling scent of blooms,

chased a flashing red to find a box-

elder bug. While men in high places called

assassinations and hookers, we learned the song

of the chickadee, the maple leaves'

hushing. As boys fought to "protect our way

of life," we lived like we knew

we were going to die.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Eye-Opening

The stepping back happened

somewhere across the Atlantic.

My king’s-eye-view grew sharp

away from dulling billboards

of realtors, God-zilla-sized,

and 99¢ super-sized fries.

Now the outsider in that Wash-

n-Go operating theatre,

America, where they dissect

and stroke and reconstruct,

with solemn, incessant

concentration, omnipotent

image of Image.

The manufacture of discontent.

From where these feet stand

I see vistas their best-kept-

secrets cannot touch.

And the resplendent truth

of what they don’t see

makes me want to gush.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Impression

At evening's widest we'd go.

To our wall-flower of a beach,

past the dormant store fronts,

the charity shop and D. I. Y. Or

I'd lead us down the cobbled

alley where I liked to peek

in cottage windows, warm,

their ancient stoniness,

as a foreign accent. At that

time of day, the light cut

diagonals across counterpanes, cast

origami shadows on doors

brightly high-glossed. Made

the water a stippled reflection of dusk

light, a North Sea impression.

The beach itself now veiled in gauze.

The castle hillside a shelter from

the hen-pecking wind. We'd wade

through sand thick with tumbled glass,

and bits of china (from Europe's tables?),

laying claim to a pristine rite

in the eloquence of memory.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Timing is everything

It was no time to start explaining.

A gap,

a silent minute to communicate

muffled by distance and years.

Your hand squeezed mine

under the table of your new engagement.

On your other hand

a new stranger to me,

your sanguine, alarmingly welcoming

would-be-wife

(our circuit of hands

a home science experiment gone awry).

The bones of my fingers still ache

your urgent, shouted, crackly message—

intended to calm.

A moment of silent prayer turned terror-

stricken, sick with disappointment,

head awash with freshly cooked carrots

and cracker box kitchen made homey

with snapshots of kisses and greeting cards,

you sitting next to me for the last time in my life.

She quizzed me with scholars' name-dropping.

I managed a barely concentrated intelligence,

pretending to be with two, not one,

virtual strangers.

I don’t know what I said.

Though I didn’t notice at the time,

the music: solo violin

electrified the room.

Walls and floors and people I should not touch.

When she finally left there was nothing to say

that could be said.

Your cat (whom she had rescued in Florence

Nightingale fashion from certain death)

bore our affections,

strokes of preoccupation.

I tried to explain why I had come, and cried.

You said, “timing is everything.”

I was late.

As overdue as closure when I stumbled

on to that night’s dark porch.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

A Rival

The girth of my ankles

told you’d soon come.

All in order the cornstarch

powder, lace dresses, bathing

cloths and changing mat,

the garage sale rocker

Nana bought as cancer choked

her bowels. Your

nursery was a spring

in our scorched home, the tube

of a clenched leaf that stored

rain. Under my skin I held it

like a cistern, until the day

you arrived, emptying and filling

me, body and soul, until it seeped

and seeped between my legs. More

menacing to your dad, this joining,

our rapt and untold need,

than any prior rival. You,

staring at me through his eyes,

were like an exquisite painting

of some epic horror.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Leaving Home

How could I know then how far from home

the trip would take me? Seventeen years

and a dorm-full of papery blue jeans

and pirated cassettes, tight-packed

like dynamite in the blue Escort Dad

bought us, our roundtrip ticket

to college. Could he have known that years

later I'd still be driving, away from him

and Mom, their Christian Coalition voter guides,

their sighs, their barbed-wire love? Could

he see how crooked a road would fall

from view in the foothills of Mt. Shasta,

or how the mythic hills of the Rogue

River Valley, laid out like dinner rolls in smooth,

green towels, would become a boundary, beyond

which lay the beasts of memory?

Could Mom have foreseen the way our words

would slow to the pace of a train wreck years

later, somewhere between my first marriage and PhD,

how we would come to speak only of others? How

is sister? Is Grandma's health improving? I packed

my fear and drove a million miles, stayed

too late in unsanctioned beds, wore my pain

in skirts too short, lost weight I couldn't afford

to lose. Didn't call home. Fifteen years

of miles now span our tedious unknowing and I

am listening hard for kinship's blood-beat, for

the whispered welcome of voices just like mine.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Reversal

The light from your pickup

mists into darkness,

capturing in oblique rows,

the houses of the poor.

Dulling squares of light

reach to answer headlamps.

Under destitution’s weight

front porches twitch and sag

like eyelids. The dirty walls,

the dirty cars that line the drives.

Dirty gates unhinged, derelict

bicycles squat in the yard.

Our mission that night,

to deliver Thanksgiving

baskets. We did so in stillness,

walking silent blocks heart in hand,

as though our words could pollute

the lesson, the measure, from

that night. Two years later,

another lesson: my car,

side by side. We found you

asleep, waiting to drive us

home. You could not keep

a straight line—you were drunk.

Your hand stumbled up my thigh.

I tried to drive a straight line,

but sixteen years spun hard

against this new doubt, wondering,

wondering how I might

explain this one to myself.

{Tricia Gates Brown}

Pristine Voices

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 01:11:00 +0000

San Marco Convento, Florence is a simple cathedral by Florentine standards, shadowy but for shards of light through high windows, minimally adorned in geometric black and white. Despite the influx of tourists, the chapel almost shudders with stillness and, unlike many Florentine cathedrals, calls people to worship. You see them kneeling at prayer benches and attending mass at altars.

But the day I first visited San Marco it swarmed with American teenagers. Clustered in small groups, they teased and flirted, running between sections of the cathedral with the heckle and jive of adolescence. The disruptive crew caught irritated glances around every corner. I exited the cathedral through a side door, planning to escape them and explore the defunct monastery adjoining the church. It turned out the kids were everywhere, rushing through the halls of the stark old monastery, up and down the narrow stairs. I was away from the chapel only ten minutes before I gave up and returned to the church where I rejoined other tourists perusing alcoves and famous paintings that all began to look the same.

And then it happened.

A sound rose through the chapel, peaceful, soft music from a choir of pristine voices. The sound was so rapturous and unexpected it was shocking. I turned to see the same rag-tag group of teenagers, seated in pews, making the sound. Their singing filled the church with light and charged it with spirit I could feel to the tips of my fingers and toes. I sat down in a pew behind them and closed my eyes. The music, the resonance of it in that cold cathedral, was as rich as good Chianti, as harmonious and gentle as love. I surmised the teenagers were a traveling choir, returning the hospitality of Italy with surprise offerings of song in its cathedrals. The song, and the gift of it issuing from such an unlikely and off-putting source, became a sort of parable to me. Grace, the spaciousness of God and God's tendency to reveal beauty in the most unexpected places and through the most unexpected people were all present in the angelic notes of this traveling choir of teens.

{First appeared in GEEZ Magazine, Fall 2011; Excerpted from author's memoir Jesus Loves Women: A Memoir of Body and Spirit published in 2011.}

Undone

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 09:07:00 +0000

Beach is a teacher. Let it undo you. Let it rattle your perceptions and discipline your senses. Observation matters, the beach tells you, wake up.
Beach is how the “aum” would look if it were a land form, extending in a line that encompasses shape and non-shape, galaxies and their smallest particles, disappearing at beginning and end, yet never really ending. At the beach, we stand and watch the earth bend like a bow and we see how little we see, how the world we think we inhabit is an illusion of lines and boundaries, hedgerows and horizons. We are so much smaller than we think until, at the beach, we think about it.
At the beach, the ghostly hands of time and erosion become visible. We see how cliffs have settled into current postures, separating from other land forms in a dramatic cleaving. We see the layers of time painted on sides of cliffs. We find sea creatures petrified and laid to perpetual rest in stone. We observe how the earth has shifted since last we were there.
Yet worlds beyond our perception exist in the sea. Schools of fish shimmy and sway like silk scarves, landscapes of stone and kelp merge with craggy outcroppings of shellfish. Mammals that dwarf the homes we live in create, fall in love, and dance under the blue-gelatin surface of our sea. There are depths of green, symphonies of sound we land dwellers will never know, separated as we are by our need for air and light.
Beach lengthens our perspective, makes us more alive on our best days. We step onto the sand and awaken to a deeper level of intimacy with ourselves and others. A walk along the ocean beckons long, sinewy conversations, expressions condensed and boiled down to the core of the matter. Commonplace at the beach, the unimaginable. Perfectly refined people squat to pee in the sea grass. People shy and modest are seduced into love-making on the sand. People reveal secrets on the beach that later come to haunt them. Grieving people cry openly at the beach, where we feel free and alone despite the presence of others.
Not long after moving to the north coast, while walking the beach with a friend, my companion commented, “Sometimes it seems like the beach is the only place big enough to hold what I feel.” Maybe that is why I came to the beach: to find a place big enough to hold what I feel.
I remember the moment I decided to come. I was in Oceanside, visiting the beach house of a friend, running from my life and running in circles. It was the summer of 2004. I walked exhaustedly along the beach, trying to accept all the things I wanted to change and could not seem to change. I had never imagined myself moving to the beach, picking myself up, along with my daughter, and moving away from the town I called home—the town of our family, the area where I’d lived my entire adult life. But as I walked along the beach on that sun-spilled summer evening, I apprehended a message, a mysterious instruction that told me: “Come here.” Seldom had the guidance of the universe come across to me with such searing clarity, “Come here,” it said. And I looked down at the sand to find a pristine sand dollar.
I moved to Oceanside. One afternoon shortly thereafter, while sitting in the picture window of the house I was renting, a beach cottage perched on a cliff that overlooked the Pacific, I saw the word “WELCOME” spelled out in slanting foam on the beach. The delusions of wishful thinking? The deception of eyes staring too long at sunlit water? Call it what you will. I took it as another message. I had come, and I was welcome.
In 2005 I relocated further up the Oregon coast, to the town of Cannon Beach. During the harrowing fall of that year, a friend of mine was among a group of human rights workers taken hostage in Iraq. His name is James Loney. When Jim was lost to captivity and none of us knew where he was or whether he would be freed, I remember thinking that Jim would want us to savor every moment of freedom he could not experience. He would want us be fully alive to what we encounter. So I began to walk on the beach in the evening with this in mind. I would tell myself I was walking the beach for Jim. I would breathe sea air into my lungs and notice the ripe smell of it. I would take note of every hue the sunset gave birth to, I would feel powdery warm sand massaging my feet and breezes lifting my hair. I would try to notice, while walking the beach, all of the artful forms wrought by nature. And I would think, “I’m taking this walk for Jim.” I did this for the 118 days of Jim’s captivity.
Now, five years after that incident, I sometimes remind myself of this as I am walking the beach. I ask myself, “Are you paying attention?” After living on the coast for six years, I get jaded. I expect we all do. And so I ask myself again “Are you paying attention?” Not for Jim this time, but for you.
And I remember how the beach can undo me.

{First appeared in RAIN Magazine 2010}

Silence

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:05:00 +0000

If you happened onto this site looking for new work, please pardon the lack. But do enjoy the old work! My recent writing energies have gone the direction of book projects (memoir and fiction), and less in the direction of poetry. If you are interested in my poetry chapbook Sackcloth and Ashes, hand-bound with letter-pressed illustrations, you can find it at galleries and book shops in Cannon Beach and Manzanita, Oregon.

A Wintery Poem for Summertime

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:36:00 +0000

Attending Yoga at Winter Solstice

Class starts at five and already it’s dark.
Radiant sconces in the Rec-Center yoga room
draw us like men to a dusky bar on a rain-split
night in December. Black locust trees twitch

scarred branches outside the windows, stripped
of their nimble fringe, as we fold bodies
like quilts around suspended hearts, release
our breath, laden with its spores of longing.

Summer solstice, the class will dwindle—but not
in winter, on the coast, where we store light
in the root and go deep. Where we ride out
storms that threaten to drown us. I rest

into Balasana, Child’s Pose, and let it pull
my tears like a drunk man’s whiskey, as I think
how winter has stolen you—each year but this,
and how I clutch my measuring stick as waters rise.

spring writings

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:43:00 +0000

The Other Part of the Miracle

is the red-wingeds’ return, black
birds with a revel of crimson
on their shoulders, a call that sags

like a drawl, like the short-long-short
of their flight. March has finally
come. Mind you the birds perch

on cattails sprung and faded, and
the grass towering still above
the swamp is dead.

The mountains in view endure
a thin chill of snow, and
the ocean at my back grows tired

of raging. But if I stand long,
I see the birds are many,
their electric-red flashes almost

hard to believe. And the trees
that edge the wetland flush
a suggestion of chartreuse.

We have outlived one more
winter of storm and loss.
Surely miracle enough.

But the other part of the miracle
is the red-wingeds’ return.

{First appeared in Northwest Coast Magazine, Spring 2009}

Nostalgia

I take issue with nostalgia. By definition, it signifies a “sentimental yearning for a period of the past.” In my view, such sentimental yearning often obscures our vision like the proverbial rose-colored glasses. I admit, I have never been good at nostalgia. I tend to err in the other direction, disproportionately remembering the past’s struggles and mistakes, and this tendency is something I wrestle with. Die-hard “nostalgics,” on the other hand, recall nothing but the glory and felicity. I am closely related to a few such individuals, and their memories of shared times and experiences often astounds me. It can be downright laughable. They have erased almost everything unpleasant from the past, including, especially, their own misdeeds! They have cleaned up the past so thoroughly, it is no wonder they pine for it with dripping sentimentality. In the shadow of such a past, the present will always pale.

I don’t believe we ought to flog ourselves for past mistakes. But I think the rosy mirage we see when we look over our shoulders nostalgically robs us of our ability to learn from the past and grow. It causes us to forget the important, healing words, “I’m sorry.” The greatest gift of the past, of history, is pedagogical. A sober awareness of our past should generally ward off sentimentality and give rise to humility and a staggering gratitude for the grace that has accompanied us. This is the kind of looking back we need for personal growth, but also for bringing healing and newness into our collective present.

Post-November 4 I find much to celebrate in looking forward. Yet I also believe that our progress demands that we not yearn for a past long-gone, a past which, from a safe distance, looks like a time of greatness, prosperity, and purity. Our progress depends on how honestly and soberly we can reckon with who we are, who we have been, and with the wounds we have afflicted on ourselves and others as well as the gifts we have imparted. Instead of glamorizing the past and embellishing the stories of our successes like old men spinning tales of fishing exploits, we must also tell about our mistakes and excesses. That is how we learn; that is how future generations learn.

A sober approach to our past may deprive us of the chance to wax heroic and drown our fears in the syrup of nostalgia, but it will also cause us to look at where we stand and at the beauty around us at this very moment, with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and possibility.

{First appeared in Oregon Humanities magazine, Spring 2009}

(em)brace yourself

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:02:00 +0000

Freedom and Loss

All of your gifts fit in one small hand.
Fingers pressed tightly, I wait

for the other voice to fall, the last
crystalline drop to slip away. Some fears

must be faced. Like swimming in the lake—ice
water assault, the breath grab of descent—how

it rewards those who steel and stay.
Shock fades to warmth, fades to ecstasy. This

is freedom: to hurt until extremities cease
to ache because blood conserves itself

in the boiling core of the body—where
eternity whispers, where life is kept,

though every other thing is lost.

{Tricia Gates Brown]

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Onto my shoulder I hoist
my pack of aims. Arrange them,
religiously, in my room,
beside change of shoes, four

books, vitamins. First,
Vespers. The bell chimes and I lurch,
judge who’s been the longest
by the ease of their gait.

On arrival, I marvel
men do this—five times a day,
plainsong the Psalms.
Hands fumbling in floor-length sleeves.

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.
My mind still full of the day’s wars.

By morning I’ve sprawled
into solitude’s space. I walk
to nowhere on labyrinth trails
festooned with new clover and rocks

donning mossy afros.
Casting off the need to prove,
improve myself, I befriend
a modest book. In the languid

hours of afternoon, snooze.
My captors unarmed. Dusk
on the pond outside my cell
spreads like eiderdown. At

Compline—with candle glow
setting on icons and altar—
my pose yields, becomes a prayer.
As shapeless and open as mercy.

{Tricia Gates Brown]

Time to Live

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:12:00 +0000

Birches

Always look straight up at them.
Feet apart. Near enough to see
their sacred scars. Let them be
your halo, white, or your crown

of thorns. Birches, like women,
are more lovely without cover,
will dizzy you with their drive
to bud and drink and live.

When they shed their skin
you will want to write your love
on their passing girlhood, to press
it in a book. You will want to give

up all for a look at the sky
through their timorous arms, which wave
a summons to come.
Time to feel. Time to live.

{First appeared in Geez Magazine, Fall 2005}

I Wake Happy Here

I wake happy here.
The light outside my window,
waves’ grandmotherly hum, the ample
luxury of this sane-soft bed. I smooth
the quilt as I rise.

Each window-blind a magician’s scarf
stripped away. Light crests the hills, hint
of sun on the sea, bleached breakers
an elysian white. Daughter asleep,
house steeped in milky quietness—
holy casa del mar,
as my monk friend says.

Birds of morning fly
into my tree, turn breasts
to wakening day. Once

from my window I saw the word
WELCOME spelled out in foam
on the beach. Swift sagging message
returned to sea. Back to mystery,
second-guessing. Back to who-
knows-where. It didn’t matter.

All of life a flash of messages:
who we are, where our hearts belongs,
where the deep welcome of time
will not be lost. Birds fly
into our trees, then ascend, mere
quivers of light, and come back again.

{First appeared in Rain Magazine, 2006}

Dreams and Portents

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 15:10:00 +0000

Both of these poems appear in my chapbook Sackcloth and Ashes, put out in 2008...

Dreams and Portents

Sometimes I picture you a boy,
love a mere seedling in your heart, unwary
of storms, drownings, of bitter growth.
Unbent by acquisition and loss.

Did you lie in bed and dream the mornings,
before work roused you with needling
demands, before a rueful sun crested
Michoacan hills and roosters crowed?

Did love sidle up to your warm skin
and steal your breath? It must have been
clear as an opal, that heart, and soft as jet-black
loam, awaiting a romance, a real hermosura,

the day the page would turn to your own
life. I wonder if you ever imagined me—
however unlikely, had a faint premonition
in the x-ray vision of night? Or did you see me

in my hometown where you lived one year—
a stranger? Did you pass me on a California street
I walked two hundred times, meet my eye one
smoldering second and ask, Could that be her?

{First appeared in Sackcloth and Ashes, 2008}

Walking, Coldest Day of the Year

The sun loves days like this, seen
in a million new ways, each blade of grass
tipped with a diamond, light refracted
into myriad forms of honor. Whole fields

of crystalline white, patched in chartreuse
here and there, where the sun went too
far. Puddles frozen and thawed, froze
again into expressionistic layers, pod

forms overlapping, concentric circles.
I pass the woman I met at the Bookmobile,
and she waves through a window. My dog
crunches brittle turf under calloused paws,

and runs over threads of moss lacy with
frost. My mind lies resting in a small
pocket, future and past dissipate like
tendrils of smoke, and you are closer to me

than my skin. I hold you inside me
like a Russian nesting doll, and when I stand
at the creek, I know you hear its trickle
and roll. When the love all around shakes me

like breath on a reed, I know you feel
the vibration. Loving a blade of grass is
loving God, and loving God is loving you.
You are a fish. Love is water.

{First appeared in Sackcloth and Ashes, 2008}

Pre-Middle Age

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:11:00 +0000

The following poems were read side-by-side at an event called "Cannon Beach Writes" in Spring 2008, and were much appreciated. Here I share them side-by-side again...

Pre-Middle

If childhood is a cradle of universal arms
and middle age a turning back—needy
or humbly surrendered; if old age the return,
and death a womb of dust, "pre-middle"

is life’s showdown with illusion.
We are discovering, my friends and I,
that we will never be as fearless or brilliant
or big as we thought you would be when

we grew up. We are acquainted with panic.
We know how it feels to betray others
in order to survive. We have faced our bodies’
first shattering, felt marriage plunge

like a canyon in the gut.
Pre-middle is watching the slow and stealthy
burial of our youth in fat and worried skin.
It is realizing our friends do not know us.

It is seeing our flaccid ambitions
as the ego-trips they are. It is watching
history repeat itself at least once, and
ourselves the mistakes of our forebears.

Pre-middle is discovering that the feet
we stand on are not our own.
It is seeing that the ground we stand on
is really nothing but grace.

[2005, Tricia Gates Brown}

One Who Lived

A thousand baby maples dot my lawn,
a host of happy helicopter-seed landings—
two-hearted, single-minded and strong. Blood
red stems: lifelines. A maple now grows

in the crack of an old swing I ride
when evening light shines amber on the canopies
of trees, magical as a Marrakesh market. The gutters
of my house sprout maples, where seeds found

fecundity in the muck of home-neglect, in
rotting layers of leaves—each a tiny flag
twitching proudly on the wind. Last month
I carried home a tray of marigolds. Dug my

careful holes, placed each start in jet-black loam
(two bucks per cubic ft.), watered them by hand,
monitored their steady decline. I’ve failed
at marigolds before. Soil too clayish, chickens

too predatory, shade, too much. It’s almost
a challenge: to make thrive the few that remain
shielded in pots on the patio. Prized and
preened. I want to be a maple, not a marigold.

Don’t want to be Ophelia, Virginia, Sylvia.
No, make me an Eliot, a Walker, Lamott. I want
to grow, to sprout in adversity. Make
me a maple. Make me one who lived.

{2004, Tricia Gates Brown}

Baptism and Berries

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:21:00 +0000

Baptism

I stepped into the waters of life there,
at Dog Island Park, where years later
stoners got high, lovers romped
in the overgrown brush. It was still

holy then. Father, Son,
and Spirit came to witness my girl-
wonder faith, burning like the river
water in my nostrils. He was holy then, too—

the minister who held my careful
hands against my chest, said the words
that mattered, just before his avalanche ride
into grace. That day, holiness dripped

from him, clung to me like a sheath
of innocence I, too, would lose, as surely as
our mirror-images, mine and the minister's, would
scatter on impact, rippling into one.

{2004, Tricia Gates Brown}

Blackberries

Sweet roadside graces, blackberries
with your tuck-and-roll bodies, your
color deep as a pupil. When you offer

your life blood, I cannot refuse,
when you say take a risk, I step on in.
Blackberries, tastiest when briars tug

at your jeans, when you incline and try
each variant fruit. This one grown bitter
through trial, this one heavy with rain,

this one dry as a sobered drunk. I touch
them till I find one soft and ready, one
that bursts in my mouth like a sun.

But oh the tangled menagerie
of shadow and green!

This summer I will not collect
blackberries, a jug of bounty to gather
frost in my freezer, to lose its cordial

taste in a chilled, white bowl. No,
I will stop at the roadside every
evening, eat only enough for today.

I will pick the berries like manna
till they are a memory, a photo
tucked in the back of a book,
to return, seductive and warm, in season.

{First appeared in Rain Magazine, 2007}

"Marching as to War"

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:42:00 +0000

On Christians Going to War to Halt Christian Violence
By Tricia Gates Brown
{Written in 2002}
I have been reading a timely book. It is a book about war, about the myriad devastations of war, and about war's singular seductiveness. In my view, it should be recommended reading for most every adult American. War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), was written by Chris Hedges who worked for years as a war correspondent, living on the knife edge of lethal conflict in places as far-flung as El Salvador and Bosnia. Hedges recounts the wars he witnessed with the integrity and bluntness of a survivor who was also an outsider. As he sees it, war is indescribably vile, and destructive in every sense of the word. It impels normal people—people like you and me—to lust after violence, to murder without hesitation.

Hedges concedes, though, that there are times when people must take the poison of war, however vile. In his introduction, he says, "There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral" (p. 16). He concludes this introduction—and here's the rub—with a reference to Reinhold Niebuhr, the modern Christian theologian most famous for legitimating Christian participation in war. Niebuhr viewed war as a sin, but felt it was a sin Christians must, at times, willingly commit—commit and then repent of. Hedges' homage to Niebuhr set me on edge, not because I cannot sympathize with Hedges' perspective, but because Niebuhr is so often used by Christians to trump Jesus, and is cited in ways that are misleading and incomplete.

I can understand Hedges' and Niebuhr's point that war is, at times, a necessary evil, whether or not I agree with it. I can see how, at times in history, war seems to be the only solution to a conflict that has sunk to levels of insane brutality and baffling complexity. World War II is offered as an example of such a conflict. Hedges cites, as another example, the war in Bosnia. Sometimes evil regimes become so powerful and so depraved that nothing but a greater show of violence and force appears able to stop them.

But the argument that Christians should adopt methods of violence to address situations like those described above, fails to acknowledge the role Christian recourse to violence often plays in creating those situations in the first place. Many of the conflicts of the past century reached the fatal point at which war seemed inevitable because people who called themselves Christians had, for years, allowed themselves to practice violence and domination. Christians in Germany allowed hatred and racism, natural corollaries to war, to take root among them. They in turn empowered Hitler. Likewise, Christians in the former Yugoslavia allowed gangsters and criminals to lead them into a war fueled by racism and manufactured enmity.

Using Niebuhr as justification, many Christians argue we should be open to the option of war because, at times, history demands that we act to stop rampant violence. Yet so often violence is allowed to run rampant and to spiral out of control because of Christian acquiescence to it. How can more bloodshed by Christians be a solution in such a predicament?

Jesus taught his followers the way of nonviolent resistance and how to forego violence. On this, he was clear. The problem with the idea that Christians may, in situations like the Holocaust, have to resort to violence, is that the majority of Christians have been resorting to violence in most every conflict we have been engaged in since the dawn of Constantinian Christianity. It is our failure to heed Jesus' call to nonviolence that has, in large measure, allowed situations like the Holocaust, and the genocide in Rwanda, and the massacres of El Salvador to happen. All of these wars happened in places where the majority of the population called itself Christian.

When Christians maintain openness to violence, history has shown we will more often than not use it for self-interested purposes, not as a last resort when all other methods of resolving conflicts have proven ineffective, as Niebuhr envisioned. These days, I see numerous Christians supporting all-out war against Iraq because it is viewed as necessary to protect the interests and security of our country. We are not altogether unlike the pre-World War II Germans, who had laid themselves wide open to the seductions of violence long before Hitler came along. We do not face a situation like World War II, or like Bosnia, yet a great number of Christians in our country enthusiastically hop on the war wagon. Many Christians are resisting the drive to war, but the majority beat their drums to the rhythm set by Washington. This is the result of centuries of Christian acquiescence to violence, and inattention to the teachings of Jesus.

It is time for Christians to say "no" to war absolutely, to invest ourselves in addressing global conflicts nonviolently, and in actively striving to make friends of our enemies. The present-day "yes" to violence and war voiced by so many Christians is paving the way for a conflict of mammoth proportions, a conflict in which, one of these days, it will seem that only violence and force can win the day. But the fact is, the majority of Christians chose the path of war long ago, and that path, that choice, will help bring us to the brink of "inevitable" war again and again.

Two Daughter Poems

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:19:00 +0000

Here are two poems about my daughter, Madison. I see both are a few years old, which means I will have to write another poem about her soon.

Mothers & Daughters

I watch how you watch me
while you pretend not to notice—
a mother’s life like a nature program
depicting embarrassing things.

Two animals having sex, perhaps,
or a female giving birth. Someday
will you say: What a wonder!
The delicate workings, the grace

in it all, seeing how I struggle
toward life? You, the cautious one,
who will hold a steady job when time
comes, keep one husband, a sensible match

you will choose by ticks on a page.
Not altogether fair you have me—
a puff of air, and not a family home
in the country you can work and save

for, buy one day for your own child,
a daughter who will long for alien
lands, exotic people, the jolting
twist at the end of every tale.

{2005 Tricia Gates Brown}

On My Daughter’s Adolescence

You wear strength like a red scarf
at your neck. A shrugging puff
of silk against each perfunctory snub,
each mind-bending, hormonal blow.

It’s a wonder to me you are mine. Now
your slow life begins, the well
of your womanhood filled by a drip, a drip
that starts in red, leaving its angry

question mark, its trail of long
lessons learned. If I could I would wrap
my own trail in pretty, preemptive ribbon, fill
your quota with my spent pain. You

could skip the boys who will chew
you up and spit you out, the friends
who will leave, the simpering stare
of men expecting you to fail, the embarrassments

sleep doesn’t erase. But my well-
meaning hands are bound; Wisdom gives
eyelids, not reins. For me, it’ll be a ride—
your adolescence—on a fast-moving train.

Light and tunnel-black,
light,
tunnel-black,
to the end.

{2004 Tricia Gates Brown}

Whatever Kindles at Bluffton University

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 05:25:00 +0000

As I write this, actors at Bluffton University are rehearsing my play, Whatever Kindles. Their production will be staged in mid-November. Though I won't be traveling to Bluffton, Ohio, to see the production, I feel the excitement. The production will be the second for Whatever Kindles, a play about the lives of individuals volunteering for Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT). The first production of Whatever Kindles was staged at George Fox University in 2007 (see accompanying photos).

Christian Peacemaker Teams work to prevent violence and promote alternatives to war around the world, and presently work in Iraq, the West Bank, Columbia, and other regions devastated by war and conflict. Whatever Kindles is a fictional play based on the stories of actual events in the lives of CPT members working to further peace in the world and wrestling with the struggles inherent in that work.

Rumi's Guesthouse

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:40:00 +0000

A friend just shared with me the following Rumi poem. It compliments the thoughts expressed in my "non-sermon" below, so I post it here...

The Guest House
by Rumi

This being human is a guest-house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture,
Still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
Meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
Because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

Not a Sermon

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 05:23:00 +0000

In their Summer 2008 issue, GEEZ Magazine held a contest soliciting "30 sermons you would never hear in church." My submission was chosen among the 30, though it is more of a "non-sermon," as the title makes clear...

"A non-sermon"
by Tricia Gates Brown

My weekly church attendance started when I was three years old and my parents “got saved.” It ended about four years ago, when I relocated to a new town at the age of 34. I have a ready excuse for family members concerned about my church non-attendance since I work on Sundays. When I tell them this they nod sympathetically and express hopes that my hours will change so I will be granted the blessing of church. What I don’t tell them is that I really don’t want to return to church. I doubt I will ever return to church.

I do like to connect with people spiritually, and I do this – outside of church. And when I want to pray or sing praises, I do this too – outside of church. I have spirit-nourishing rituals I do outside of church, and ways that I “serve.” What I have found no substitute for and what I do not miss, are sermons. The idea of everyone sitting and listening to the same few people preach every Sunday no longer makes sense to me. I just don’t get it anymore.

If I could stand at a pulpit during sermon time and deliver a message, it would be this: “Leave! Go find the truth – it is within you. Go find a quiet place, a place where your spirits and minds can stretch out, where they can look inward and outward. And return there as often as possible.

“The voice of God speaks through the language of every experience and feeling and fear and insight you have. Listen to what it tells you. Do not be afraid of anything it will say. Do not be afraid of any appetite, habit or thought you have – notice it, listen to it, acknowledge it.”

The most important spiritual work happens in the desert and the closet, and the great religions all affirm this. But the practitioners of those religions increasingly fear this sort of silent, solitary “working out one’s salvation.” Church attendance tends to become a substitute for this and people tend to avoid silence.

I do treasure community – with neighbors, friends and people I encounter through my job. I value shared spiritual practice, which can happen almost anywhere if we are open to it and have spiritual friendships. Everyone needs community, and communities need us.

Some fear that embracing solitude in order to encounter God makes us individualistic, insensitive to others and un-rooted. But I find it nourishes our roots and sensitivity. The more we become aware of what churns inside us – the life and the death, the light and the dark, the love and the hate – the more deeply we will connect with our neighbors and the more compassionate and humble we will be. We will see God in everyone and touch God everywhere. We will be full of love.

If I were behind the pulpit I would say: “No preacher standing here can give you the wisdom you have within your very soul. So, why are you sitting here? No one but you can train your ears to hear the song of love God has been singing to you from the day you were born. So go to the closet, go to the desert, go to the woods and get quiet.”

{First appeared in GEEZ Magazine, Summer 2008}

One Light, One Dark

noreply@blogger.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:53:00 +0000

Two of my older poems...

The Bookmobile

It is clear one’s life has simplified

when it becomes the social high point

of the week. The Bookmobile

man (who’s name I don’t even know),

one’s most frequent, extra-familial

interlocutor. Every Wednesday

at five, the bus rolls into town.

My daughter gathers our tower

of books in eager arms (It’s here!

she says, looking down from our hilltop),

and we set out like traders for the outpost

of new ideas. The whole world,

I suspect, should be like the Bookmobile.

Nothing in excess, enough for everyone—

kindly limited and predetermined

by unseen hands. Two dozen cookbooks,

one rack for CDs, novels on a single

proud stand. No more bad news

than will fit in a 12-inch stack.

When we exit the Bookmobile,

it is sunset. The sky unfurls a pageant

of pink to herald evening, time

for food and rest, for scattering our

books, like rose petals, on the bed.

{Poem first appeared in Rain Magazine, 2006}

Fortunetellers

We'd fashion fortune-

tellers with a notebook's page.

Under the creased angles of fate:

movie-star husband, glamour job.

I was the jealous sister.

Sitting now in the ICU

beside your cancer-twisted child,

I recall the game. Cancer didn't lurk,

a skulking idea, beneath our

future's blue-lined folds.

I didn't lift a corner to divorce or, pick

a color: B-L-U-E, a kid

with A-D-D. Can't say the thought

didn't cross my mind: you get the one

with cancer, and odds are I won't.

You swim these locks of grief,

past wheelchair dash of balding boys,

alcoholic babies; I note

the fine paintings on the wall.

On the drive, autumn's gilt,

melancholic splendor. My

sensuality clads a longing and dread.

What will be the bright green gift,

the tissue-petaled charm,

on the other side of this

long winter's loss?

The purposes of gods

seem buttoned and blank.

{Poem first appeared in The Portland Review, Summer 2003}