This New Doubt

Silence

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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"

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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

triciagatesbrown@iinet.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}

New Neighborhood

triciagatesbrown@iinet.com (Tricia Gates Brown) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:11:00 +0000

I am gradually moving my poetry website to this blog site. Thank you for visiting me in my new neighborhood. As of yet, I have not quite moved in, but keep checking for additions to the site. Besides poetry, the site will feature other writings and artwork. Photos will occasionally be posted. Welcome, and do come again!