Patti Trimble is a Poet, Essayist, Visual Artist and Educator based in California and Italy. Patti will be writing whilst at Maelor and you can read examples of her poetic works below.

This is Patti’s second residency at Maelor.

FOUR POEMS

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Thinking to be born again, the solstice

pulls itself up, from a well of sweeter water.

 

The wind has bite of salad with no salt and days

run, shoeless, deft, towards mineral beginnings.

 

The rain is like a woman shaking rugs.

Grass is newborn baby’s hair.

 

This lamp-frail sun, how shadowed by sobriety,

our need, our yearning to be perfect winter seed.

 

 

Patti Trimble 2018

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We are seed. As we are also arrow, target, punctuation,

density to hold. We are our favorite drinking cup,

 

sometimes filled, sometimes emptied of our resonance,

duende, fight. We are also elegant and ornamental lack,

 

erased when trees of oranges or bright autumn skies

pass clear on through. Even more invisible when winter

 

sinks so low the hills resemble horses who have lost the race,

heads bent down to drink in green and disillusionment.

 

I love their lesson: how to suffer failure without shame.

Hills and horses, none remember lining up at starting line,

joined with Earth on lockdown now, hunkered down to work.

 

 

Patti Trimble 2018

 

 

 

 

 

Between wilderness and the order of the house,

two girls make their way.

 

One tends the orchard, olive, plum, and pomegranate.

The other daughter howls at stars.

 

The garden fence is a sign for boundary. Geometry

and the possible wind. One girl races to the woods—

 

anything to race away. Berries, experimental paths,

broad proprietorship, hillsides wide like a Kodiak bear.

 

The other hangs the sheets to dry, plumps up

pillows singing. Sometimes bounds the fence

 

to hold hands, calm her fear. Both girls listen first,

then smell, then look, and reach.

 

One cups the lemon while it hangs upon the tree.

The other pinches a blackberry for ripeness.

 

Both wear the sky like a glove.

 

Patti Trimble   (Recipient: 2016 46-er Award, Adirondack Review)

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I met a bobcat in the spring, when the thistles

bobbed their lavender and downy heads naively

in the soft phenomenon of newborn hills.

 

He lowered and he dropped down low,

widened to command the path.

 

He hardened his round eye and steeled his fur,

toughened even the tufts on the points of his ears.

 

There is a way a bobcat looks when I am not present.

 

And likewise every field softens beyond suggestion—

the world more wild than I’m allowed to see.

 

Patti Trimble   (published, Cult! Magazine, Munich)