Pema Chodron - Brown Couch (a Sestina)

Pema Chodron -Brown Couch

A Sestina

Introduction by Melody Gough

The sestina is a poem of thirty-nine lines broken into six stanzas of six lines each. The poem closes with a tercet. All the sources I consulted said that a man named Anault Daniel was credited with inventing the sestina. He died around 1210, so it shows you just how far back this poetic form goes!

This form relies heavily on the use of repetition. You must come up with six words that will be repeated throughout the poem. In the following example, I have chosen the words planted, dirt, tulips, green, hard, and garden. These six words repeat throughout each stanza in a particular pattern and must appear at the ends of the lines. For sake of example, here are numbers to illustrate each word in the pattern.

Stanza 1
1
2
3
4
5
6

Stanza 2
6
1
5
2
4
3

Stanza 3
3
6
4
1
2
5

Stanza 4
5
3
2
6
1
4

Stanza 5
4
5
1
3
6
2

Stanza 6
2
4
6
5
3
1

Stanza 7
The first line contains 6 and 5
The second line contains 2 and 4
The third line contains 3 and 1

Pema Chodron - Brown Couch

A Sestina

Listening to Pema on the groundlessness of our situation
remembering my Mother on that brown couch calling it the dilemma
and my Father died on it so I hate big brown couches, but letting go,
while Pema whispers on about self involvement if we don’t face fear
on our journey and conquer our “ubiquitous nervousness”
by smiling at fear and donning a shaky tenderness, a love, for each other.

I have noticed how we wear a mood of gloom or pass judgment on another
and either don’t understand or don’t want to understand how our situation
arose because of the ice in our heart, and that our anxiety or nervousness
simply opens the door to negative ways of dealing with our dilemma
by actually taking our groundlessness and expanding and exaggerating fear
instead of leaning into the sharp points and gently letting go.

Like letting go the brown couch, we choose which way we go
and can either accept or reject our own humanity, each other,
by learning some tenets of the Buddha, she says, investigating fear
and understanding that it stems from the groundlessness of our situation,
that is, seeking happiness in the face of our mortality, a dilemma
philosophers write about, but usually do not include “ubiquitous nervousness.”

Father said, “You don’t accept a certainty of heaven. That's why you're nervous!”
No, not true! I’m nervous because you’re dying and I have to let go!
You loved my Mother with all your heart and she still called it a dilemma
while resting on that brown couch in Glendale with one another,
until you could no longer carry-her-to-the-bathroom-kind-of-situation
so that hospice was far better for her because it relieved the fear!

Listening to Pema again telling us that by facing our fear
and understanding that we all share this anxiety or “ubiquitous nervousness”
that we also share the softness of our groundless situation
and that going under, we can also surface for more air, and let go
of all those wrappings and masks and armor that keep us from each other
and create a background for hatred, war and all those violent situations.

Writing a Sestina while packing up and preparing to move--my dilemma!
I bought a new white couch and just said to hell with that brown fear!
I want to let my words hold you, and we’ll embrace each other
with tenderness and understanding, and say NO to nervousness.
we’ll watch the sun rise on a gentler framework of letting go,
and just BE for one day and not call life a brown-couch situation!

Nervousness may even disappear if we hold each another
tenderly and feel our dilemma vanish along with fear:
we might even go smiling into a new, improved situation.

11.11.2010

This photograph shown in this blog is not

the actual brown couch referenced in the Sestina. KDW>