Pre-election. Cows.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

November 2, and chatter is all about midterms and the lingering balmy and dry weather. Variables.

For whatever mysterious reason, I keep thinking of Hayden Carruth’s “Cows at Night” poem, which I’ve surely quoted here, perhaps numerous times over the years. This weekend, the moon waning, I drove home on a back road after dinner with friends. In the rural dark, I passed intermittent houses, windows glowing. Where I’d been was hot, so I drove with the sunroof open, in my thin sweater, the scent of woodsmoke drifting in with the breeze, my head filled with a killer live blues band. But where my road parts left, I kept driving, through the village mostly closed up, and to the town forest where I parked.

I’m mostly not afraid of the dark except when I’m terrified. I’ve lived a whole adult life to write this—mostly not afraid except when I tremble with fear—for the immeshed reasons of experience and will and desire that spiral into all our lives. In the thin starlight, I walked along the path, the woods redolent with fallen leaves. Where the path edged along a field, I paused and placed my hand against a white pine, listening, listening. Were the cows yet in the field? The night opened my eyes wide. Yes, indeed, the cows, shifting and chewing, steady.

The Cows at Night

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

I stopped, and took my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad

and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them–forty
near and far in the pasture,

turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad

because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.

But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how

in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.

How the River is Cut.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I often write here about this season or that season—Siberian blue quill season or the beginning of the swimming season. It’s tamarack season now, great gold evergreen torches among bare branches. Yet, balmy, balmy. Busy, busy, at work, my desk between an open window and the door that leads into the hall where people come and go, all day long. Midday, I slip out wordlessly, walk to the lake where the quietness matches my mind. The summer people have all gone now.

In the evening, warm as spring with the darkening light true to November, a crazy mixed-upness, I restlessly walk around the village, my usual walking companions elsewhere, out of touch. The night falls quickly, and here’s another thing I’m grateful for: to generally not fear the dark. Lord knows, there’s plenty else we each fear.

On a bridge over the Lamoille River, I pause for the longest time, mesmerized by the gloaming light, the crickets still murmuring in a nearby field, by the swirl of people. For no particular reason at all but that low river flowing over stones, its hue shifting and flickering, I remember reading Norman Maclean so many years ago, as a young woman, the summer I lived in a tipi in a field of wild blueberries.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” ― Norman Maclean

Good Writers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

I rarely show my face here, a few author or event photos, myself in New Mexico a summer ago, in a dress patterned with lemons I’d bought for my oldest daughter, the photo she took of me in a hospital elevator, two days before surgeons took a scalpel to my belly and cut.

Here, on the advent of yet another stick season, I paused and snapped photos of my reflection in the dirty windows of a nearly abandoned town grange. Two in one post? How’s that for nonsensical? November, a season I’ve often met with dread. This year, a welcome respite, the lengthening nights that encourage waking in the darkness, as in a secret. Finally, after a struggling summer, I’m writing hard about grief and illness, death’s foggy abyss, fear. My youngest had just headed to college, the sting of her absence barely scabbing over, when I was overcome with cancer, and my daughters flocked back. Now, we are all well, all healthy, so I am learning again to live without what Tillie Olsen called moving according to the rhythms of others. The deep pleasure of connecting with old friends, the sweetness of new people that chance and writing and disease have brought my way.

November is the twilight’s gloaming beauty, the sharpening of cold, warmth of woodstove, the pleasure of light. I’ve lucked upon reading the Lieke Marsman, who writes:

Are there writers who can succeed without melancholy?

Good writers, I mean.

Writers without fury?

Good writers, I mean.

Moon Shadow.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A line an acquaintance wrote recently sticks with me….. how the world feels increasingly artificial and the antidote is to chop wood. That Zen phrase — chop wood, carry water — certainly not written for late Vermont autumn, but yet… apt. Early mornings in the dark, I boil water for coffee, the wood floor chilly beneath my bare feet. Not painful, simply something to note. Flesh, wood, temperature. The cats, thinking otherwise, sleep in the stray ash beneath the woodstove.

As the country rushes towards yet another election, late autumn moves in conversely slowly, balmy and verging on warm. Barefoot, I stack wood on my back porch, gather the summer’s garden debris of emptied flower pots, my watering can. Nearing November, the sky is sooty with the remains of sunlight. I rake leaves over the garden, gather apples and bake a pie, write everyday, do billable hours. I think: paint a bedroom before Thanksgiving. In all of this, time races through from that pre-dawn coffee to the evenings I lie on couch, reading. One cat emerges from pre-winter hibernation to nestle against my hip.

The nights are cold. Walking under the full Hunter’s Moon, a friend asks why we always seem to walking beneath the shining moon. The moonlight is so brilliant my cupped hands hold moonbeams. The bare branches are shadows across my boots. At dinner, we’d talked about what’s real, what’s not, and the national trend to make up your own narrative, facts be damned. In the witchy, enchanting moonlight, the whole thing seems real: fact, lie, shadow, brilliance, health and disease, the near and faraway. The evolving story.

To be well again, what might that mean?

The flowering plum sprung from late snow… ~ Meena Alexander

Night Wanders.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Late autumn means shortening days which means a reacquaintance with darkness. In sooty twilight, I slip through the narrow path in the pines and into the cemetery, a letter in my hand. Quickly, night settles in.

At the bottom of the hill where this back street joins Main Street, an elderly man leans against the railings on a second-floor landing. The storefront has six apartments above it, and the tenants linger on the covered back stairs in all weather, all times of the year. I pause, and we talk about the balmy fall, the fattening half moon. Then I wish him a good evening and head along.

In the way of small towns, I know pieces of his story—he’s a veteran who served in a war that may seem forever ago, or perhaps just a few breathfuls of air in the past—and he may know snippets of my life, too. I drop my letter in the mailbox and circle through the village. Darkness settles in, and I follow the sidewalk home, not tromping through the woods and the cemetery. Save for passing cars, there’s no one out, house windows filled with people moving about their chores. Ordinary evening under the splendid night sky.

“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”
― Alan Watts

Ursa Major, companion.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Pristine frost covers the picnic table this morning, the shriveled remains of the rudbeckia leaves, late autumn inexorable as hell. Pausing at the end of a walk yesterday, my friend asks if I can hear the crickets at my house. The scamper of squirrels, a few snips of birdsong, the bounce of the neighbors’ basketball: that’s about all.

In the evening, I check the dampers on my woodstove, zip up my coat, and walk a few streets over to meet neighbors. The night is dark as a pantry, the constellations already promising winter’s icy beauty. Walking, hands in my pockets, I’m thinking I need to find my mittens, and also I’m remembering a conversation with an acquaintance, a visual artist, who remarked that the winter is always a source of creativity for her, a place in sink into. True, I know, the double-edgedness of this season, remarkable for its beauty, its harshness.

My neighbors and friends pack into the Main Street art center, jammed with the eclecticism of Vermont: the elderly couples, the kids running upstairs, and everyone else in-between, in wool hats and sweaters like me. Later, walking home, the moon hangs as a boat with a curved bottom in the upper bare branches of trees. My boots with worn-to-holes soles and split leather strike the sidewalk. I’ve walked this stretch numberless times, and yet… the night is sparkling new, Ursa Major over my shoulder, my frosty breath a cloud that vanishes into the night.

“Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this ‘Ah’, because there’s something in them that’s brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here’s the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling ‘why am I so ordinary?’, you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn’t realised or you’d forgotten human beings could shine so.”
― Niall Williams