“The world is a complex fatigue.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

August appears, and I’m at work Saturday morning, trudging around a lake in a thickety forest with some of my favorite people in town, talking work and books and the edginess of this fleeting life, the puzzling conundrums of what people do.

Below, the Hayden Carruth poem I’ve posted before around August 1, during the years I’ve written in this space. Every year, when I read this poem again, different lines pop out. Here, “The world is a complex fatigue.” If I began a list of things I learned in my year (now, year and some) of surviving cancer and cancer treatments, gracious, I would keep writing and writing. The cats would not be fed this morning. The blueberries would not be picked.

But to return to August…. June, July, August, in my way of reckoning, these are Vermont’s high holy months, the long days of sweet roses and waving rudbeckia, the welcomeness of ice on your tongue, walking in twilight, the loveliness of sunlight chips and loons on pond water. Those worn clichés — savor every day, know your luck — are true of course, in the way that truth is multitudinous — in the way that Mac Barnett notes that Be Kind might be a given starting place, but not a plot. And human life, of course, is plot, plot, plot. Often, not of our own making.

Story, of course, is where I’m headed. These midsummer days, the glossiest greens already fading. As I’ve done for years, I hold to the strands that keep me sane in this world illusory and fragile and heartstoppingly thrumming with might far beyond any one or two or few of us… the chords of this mortal life. The gritty and sometimes joyous labor of writing, of walking in the world, the domesticity of family and friends. Brew coffee, weed the garden, ponder the sky.

AUGUST FIRST
by Hayden Carruth

Late night on the porch, thinking
of old poems. Another day’s
work, another evening’s,
done. A large moth, probably
Catocala, batters the screen,
but lazily, its strength spent,
its wings tattered. It perches
trembling on the sill. The sky
is hot dark summer, neither
moon nor stars, air unstirring,
darkness complete; and the brook
sounds low, a discourse fumbling
among obstinate stones. I
remember a poem I wrote
years ago when my wife and
I had been married twenty-
two days, an exuberant
poem of love, death, the white
snow, personal purity. now
I look without seeing at
a geranium on the sill;
and, still full of day and evening,
of what to do for money,
I wonder what became of
purity. The world is a
complex fatigue. The moth tries
once more, wavering desperately
up the screen, beating, insane,
behind the geranium. It is an
immense geranium,
the biggest I’ve ever seen,
with a stem like a small tree
branching, so that the two thick arms
rise against the blackness of
this summer sky, and hold up
ten blossom clusters, bright bursts
of color. What is it — coral,
mallow? Isn’t there a color
called “geranium”? No matter.
They are clusters of richness
held against the night in quiet
exultation, five on each branch,
upraised. I bought it myself
and gave it to my young wife
years ago, in a plastic cup
with a 19cent seedling
from the supermarket, now
so thick, leathery-stemmed,
and bountiful with blossom.
The moth rests again, clinging.
The brook talks. The night listens.

Wild and Human Worlds, Intersection.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

In New Hampshire for a book reading, visiting bro — all the New Hampshire things: granite boulders and thickety woods, the clear Saco River where we alternate post-hike lying in the pebbly river and warming on the water-polished rocks, so much talk and laughter, all the things.

A fellow hiker stops us on the trail and points at two black bear cubs in a tree, the great mama below, brown-nosed like a creature in a child’s picture book, but of course not at all like a child’s tale. Wordlessly, we admire the animals, one cub climbing a branch, round in limb, enchanting. Then slowly we make our way off the trail and through the forest, a great half-circle, to leave these creatures to their own wild way.

In my own corner of Vermont, I’ve spied so many bears this summer. Always, this flash of awe, this sense of luck to know this sliver of wild, immediately followed by caution: keep our human realm away from these creatures in their own bear domesticity.

It is a mystery to me where each word begins and ends, let alone each phrase. ~ Jean Said Makdisi

July, Sweet and Sour.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

I read in the New York Times that Catcher in the Rye turns 75, a novel my mother first shared with me. My parents owned little fiction; our house was mostly filled with philosophy books, David Hume (who I never read) and Plato and Aristotle. In those shelves was jammed a copy of Huckleberry Finn and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Ten Stories, drug-store paperbacks held together with rubber bands. Books I love — and maybe you do, too.

In this lushly lingering month of July — filled with sun and swimming, with work and chores — I’m lucky to have scheduled a dozen readings for Call It Madness, this novel about Vermont and family and how the sodden past shapes our lives. Of all the books that reflects my life, Long Day’s Journey into Night surely ranks at the top. A reader pointed out to me recently that Call It Madness moves forward linearly, but is packed with the past, events that happened decades ago that remain as vibrant as this morning’s news.

I write in the world of cause and effect — our actions always propel consequences — but the past with its radiant joy and unquenchable sadness propels us mightily. Nonetheless, the pear trees previous owners planted in my front yard bear reddening fruit. The bees suck globe thistle. Sunday evening, I walk far along the river, the running water sunk low among exposed rocks. The sunlight lingers — so much light in these days sugary with freshly-mown hay. I’d like to pocket a handful of July and return in January: humans, we can launch ourselves to the moon but July-in-January is impossible. Nothing to do but quaff the present while it exists.

hydrangeas
pale blue in the rain
blue in the moonlight

By Masaoka Shiki | Translation by Lucien Stryk

Singing a Love Song, Swimming.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

It’s nearly 8 in the evening by the time I step into #10 Pond, the sun slipped down around this narrow pond surrounded by mountains, my only company two teenage girls who stand on the shore talking about a mother’s car—these girls and a loon calling.

I part the still waters and swim out. Despite raging heat elsewhere on the globe, Vermont’s summer holds a chill, and by the time I swim back, I’m cold. On the shore, the girls have disappeared, and under the twilight sky it’s just shivering me toweling off water, pulling on a sweatshirt. All afternoon, I’ve thought of this water, of the sky turning from blue to black, of the mud beneath my bare feet, the loon chorus. It’s been a day of work and laughter, nothing rotten that I’d like to leave at the bottom of the pond; nonetheless, July moves along, the relentlessness of time. I crave these moments of water and sky, of reading beneath the apple tree’s shade, dinner near the garden, as much sun and wind and, yes, cold water as I can bear. Sustenance.

“But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain. ”
― Billy Collins

The WHAT IS.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My brother and I break off the rail trail and hike up a spur trail. I haven’t been here before, but I once lived on the side of the moutanin where we now head. July, neither hot nor cold, we’re in shorts and t-shirts, walking and talking, laughing about things only siblings seem to hold. It’s just us and the hermit thrush and mosquitoes. We’ve left phones and work behind; maybe it’s 1978 again.

A few hours later, we descend steeply into the other end of town, where Cooper Brook runs by the liquor store, Dollar General, a snack shack. Through goldenrod, we walk along the sandy former railroad bed. A dense forest shelters around and turns the trail to muddy ruts, stones washed slick with recent rain. Frogs leap from puddles. I step around a wide toad.

My brother’s visited many times, most with me, some alone in my house while I was in the hospital. In the evening, we pick up the tour again, walking through the brushy path to the cemetery that seems to delight only me. Ticks! Blackberry brambles! It’s just a short stretch, and I strangely revel in this tangled passage, as if a portal from home to village, sweetened with black raspberries. We stop and visit a new neighbor, then trek again downtown, to the river where workers have been re-armouring the granite walls all summer, pouring footings for a suspension bridge.

I point out the shop where friends feed feral cats—one sleek creature sitting in the driveway, watching—and the house that burned and a woman died. My map of the town unspools: the apartments with the overdoses, the former inn where, in a garret room, I once met a therapist in a rainstorm whose dogs lay on the floor and I begged her to salvage my life from a chaotically breaking marriage. As I stared out the window at the rain crashing on the porch roof below, I realized whatever salvaging was going to be done had to be done by myself. Downstairs was a now closed-up bakery where I bought donuts with my youngest daughter. The superintendent’s office where I attended a hundred school board meetings. The river’s edge, where I gathered white pebbles with my daughters and created a rock garden.

Countless treks around this little town. Mid-July, neither hot nor cold, the wind still, the river low. I’ve seen the town flood, brutal cold descend. Atlas I’m creating of manifold layers.

…. and a thank you to David Goodman of VTDigger for this podcast with the writer Catherine Tudish.

“Prayer” by Galway Kinnell

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

“The present pushes back the life of regret.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Lucky, lucky to reading in such charming backroads Vermont places. Lucky to be driving with a companion who gets me there via google maps and keeps me company on the drive. I’ll read at The Norwich Bookstore tonight, that familiar trek down I-91, but this time turning at Exit 13, not east towards Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center but east towards the literary world. With deep satisfaction. (Book signing Saturday, July 18, at Phoenix Books in Burlington, 1-3pm)

A friend stops by and cautions me that thunderstorms and hail, maybe fire and brimstone are expected tonight. I laugh because, well, why not. There’s those cliches about life’s a journey and so on, reductive things for a bumper sticker or card, with of course a soul of truth. Early evening, I read under the butternut tree, sparrows chittering, a woodchuck grazing beneath the lilac hedge. I’ve been here before: such a gorgeous wild sprawling summer, and already the days are dampening at each end, just the merest. The neighbors drive up, cheery and sweaty from baseball, and agree yes, more sun, more summer. The woodchuck looks up, untroubled, and munches on. I think, I could get a dog. Or not.

A mosquito bites my big toe. Swifts dart above my head.

The present pushes back the life of regret.
It draws forward the life of desire. Soon memory
will have started sticking itself all over us.
We were fashioned from clay in a hurry,
poor throwing may mean it didn’t matter
to the makers if their pots cracked. — Galway Kinnell