Author: Brett Ann Stanciu

The Silence Means Something, Too

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A few days ago, I inserted Lucille Clifton’s “The Lost Baby Poem.” In graduate school, a professor passed around copies of this poem at the beginning of one workshop. We all sat there, silently, and then a friend of mine began to cry, tears streaming down her face, soundlessly.

My professor cleared his throat and said sadly, Nothing said about this poem is enough said.

My house of females has a lot of talking, but sometimes I remind my daughters that silence can be just as mighty, the absence of words as powerful – for good or ill – as speaking or writing. That sometimes enough is really enough.

To underestimate the appeal of art is to underestimate not only poetry but also human nature. Our hunger for myth, story, and design is very deep…. If we are not in love with poems, the problem may be that we are not teaching the right poems. Yet ignorance of and wariness about art gets passed on virally, from teacher to student. After a few generations of such exile, poetry will come to be viewed as a stuffy neighborhood of large houses with locked doors, where no one wants to spend any time.

–– Tony Hoagland

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Woodbury, Vermont

Moon Rise

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This evening, we finished dinner late, and my older daughter hurried out the door, saying she’d wash the dishes as she tugged on her sweatshirt. The younger daughter rushed, too. Let’s go out, she insisted. Twilight descends rapidly now, and even along our nearly untraveled dirt road it’s too dark for a child to bike in the dark. Independent at ten, she nonetheless walked closely beside me, marveling that her older sister was not afraid. I told her I had been afraid of the dark until I was an adult, and only cured myself by walking back and forth from the sugarhouse to the house in very late nights, in snow and rain and sharp cold. I remember quite clearly how utterly impenetrable I found the dark, and how long it was before my fear lessened, and an even greater time before I welcomed the night as a familiar friend.

I assured my younger daughter she wouldn’t be afraid of the dark forever, either. Walking, we talked about why the songbirds aren’t singing now and about her school monarch butterfly project, and then as we ascended an incline, the moon abruptly appeared from behind the trees, so luminously alive it was like gazing into a pail of fresh milk, luscious with cream. We stopped, shivering a little. As the dusk fattened, my older daughter in her white shirt appeared out of the gloaming, laughing at finding us in the dark.

In all the many things of today, here’s the deepest:  the almost-full moon rising over a mountain, greeting my daughters and me in this cool Vermont night.

O Nietzsche, how wrong can you be, though
I like the way you sublimated your rage
into the colic of apoplectic, apocalyptic prophecy.
I don’t know if the world’s bad enough to deserve you,
or if chaos has miscarried at the birth of your dancing star,
but blessings on your head and house, anyway, wherever you are.

–– Patrick White

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

This Child I Nursed

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Sixteen summers ago, I was selling maple syrup and homemade ice cream at the little Hardwick Farmers Market. The market was so small then, sometime we had just a few vendors. One lovely Vermont July afternoon I sold a bowl of ice cream to a woman in her fifties who ate the ice cream while chatting with me. Just me and the baby had come in the old pickup, and when she began to fuss, I sat on a cooler and nursed her. The woman and I kept talking, and she finally said, I’m so glad you can do that. When I had babies, women had to hide away when we nursed.

I think back now on my scrappy self then, in cut-offs and a t-shirt faded from infinite washings, my absolutely gorgeous red-cheeked baby in my arms, so young I believed my youth would last forever, and I realize that was the first time I had seen my personal life as political.

Tonight, this girl all stretched out into her own lengthy self, dressed up in new black boots and dangling earrings she bought with baby-sitting money, drove my car to her first high school dance.

Where did all that go, I sometimes wonder, my le leche league fervor, my farmers market zest? But if anything, my energy has intensified and strengthened, as a stream running down a mountain gains force, momentum, might. The channel of my force has diverted – to writing a book, keeping a small school open, guiding my oldest toward adulthood. The shadow of that much younger woman is yet deep within me, and someday, when my girls have their own beloveds, I intend to offer my daughters a bowl of ice cream while they nurse.

the lost baby poem

the time i dropped your almost body down
down to meet the waters under the city
and run one with the sewage to the sea
what did i know about waters rushing back
what did i know about drowning
or being drowned

you would have been born into winter
in the year of the disconnected gas
and no car we would have made the thin
walk over genesee hill into the canada wind
to watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands
you would have fallen naked as snow into winter
if you were here i could tell you these
and some other things

if i am ever less than a mountain
for your definite brothers and sisters
let the rivers pour over my head
let the sea take me for a spiller
of seas let black men call me stranger
always for your never named sake

–– Lucille Clifton

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We are Our Own Stories

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Part of this day I spent rewriting an essay on myth, beginning:

The first day of eleventh grade, my daughter returned in the afternoon, dropped her backpack on the floor and sprawled at the kitchen table, her upper lip curled in that dissatisfied way I recognize as disgust for the adult world. We’re doing myth this year in English class. Myth, she repeated, who needs that old junk?

Rewriting this essay made me realize, again, how fundamental is logos – story – to us. My ten-year-old daughter is busily creating the story of her child life these days:  lacing up new high tops, the adventure books she reads and swaps with her friends, an attack of flying insects the other afternoon, soccer practice and watermelon for snack and what, exactly, her big sister is doing. Her life is imbued with meaning, her Story of Being Ten writ real and lovely. The old junk is us; but it took me years to realize that the word made flesh wasn’t just a poetic line, that we are, in fact, our own stories.

Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.

–– Mary OliverIMG_8999

Bridge Over the Abyss, With Baby

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Today, in a grassy field, with sunlight everywhere and school children running around, another parent told me about a long bridge he had frequently crossed as a young man, and how at times he had been afraid of that bridge. Today was so quintessentially Vermont, with a hike through the woods behind the school, little kids and big kids, just fifty in all. The grass was warm, and my daughter and I ate wild apples we had picked the evening before.

The parent’s description was entirely metaphorical – he had now progressed far enough into his life, over that halfway point, that he felt darn certain if the Subaru went over the bridge, he and the kids would pull through.

Listening, I remembered when my older daughter was one, a baby chewing on a stuffed rabbit, and I was driving down the Vermont interstate to visit my parents in New Hampshire. I was driving a beat-up red Toyota pickup too big for me, and I wasn’t able to fasten the safety belt as I sat so far forward to reach the clutch. At highway speed, I approached a long bridge spanning the White River. By chance, I happened to see the bridge in just a certain way, at great speed, and I saw how enormously high was the bridge over the river far down below in the valley.

I had a sudden fear that I absolutely could not traverse such the narrow path over that abyss. I slowed and saw a highway worker along the shoulder, and I had an abrupt impulse to stop and beg this man – a complete stranger – to drive myself and my baby across that bridge.

I didn’t, of course. Somehow I knew I would have to get myself and my baby from here to there, in whatever rattletrap I was driving. Since then, I’ve driven both daughters over many bridges, through all kinds of snowstorms, and once through a terrible ice storm, and I’ve always ferried them safely home.

But like my parent companion today, I often see that abyss beneath us, an intimation of our own morality, and yet I press on. As I drove over that bridge on my fearful day, however, I slowed more than perhaps was prudent on an interstate, and I steeled myself to peer over the guard rails. Far down, in the same tenor of autumn sunlight I sat in today, the bend of river glowed like gems.

Albert Camus wrote a novel, The Stranger, in which his character, Meursault, is condemned to death. Three days before his execution, he is able for the first time in his life to touch the blue sky. He is in his cell. He is looking at the ceiling. He discovers a square of blue sky appearing through the skylight. Strangely enough, a man forty years of age is able to see the blue sky for the first time. Of course, he had looked at the stars and the blue sky more than once before, but this time it was for real. We might not know how to touch the blue sky in such a profound way. The moment of awareness Camus describes is mindfulness: Suddenly you are able to touch life.

–– Thich Nhat Hanh, True Love

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Tomatoes on the Way Out/Photo by Molly S.

Soccer Practice & The Secret Garden

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

One of the sweet things about September is soccer practice. There’s a handful of nice kids, enthusiastic coaches, and as a mother it’s a defined moment of time in an otherwise crazy-busy life. It’s a chance to hang out with other parents or grandparents I never meet otherwise.

The field behind Woodbury Elementary backs up against forest and wetland. At this time of year, its wall of green is just giving over in patches to intimations of russet and gold, with ferns beginning to brown around the edges. The wildness there is so overgrown, that, lying on the grass and waiting for the practice to end, I thought of Mary and her secret garden, how that rose garden was hidden for ten years behind walls covered in wildness. My child’s little elementary school has a genuine domesticity to it, with flower beds and a vegetable garden and a 100-year-old schoolhouse so finely built and well-tended it welcomes you in, as opposed to the windowless cinderblock schools of my childhood.

Looking at these things – the wild wood framed around the playing children – I suddenly realized what I hadn’t seen in Burnett’s book:  the secret garden is in our hearts. Both the woods – lovely and frightening – and the school’s field with its laughing, happy children, have equal terrain in our human lives. I closed my eyes and listened to the crickets, singing what must be nearly the end of this season’s song, in the mowed grass and among the wild cucumber along the field and along the path leading into the woods.

“The girl’s… begun to be downright pretty since she’s filled out and lost her ugly little sour look. Her hair’s grown thick and healthy looking and she’s got a bright color. The glummest, ill-natured little thing she used to be and now her and Master Colin laugh together like a pair of crazy young ones. Perhaps they’re growing fat on that.”

“Perhaps they are,” said Dr. Craven. “Let them laugh.”

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Photo by Molly S.