A Wintery Poem for Summertime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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}