poetry

Apple Blossom Petals Like Snow.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

When my youngest was born, nearly 18 years ago, my brother had a new cell phone that had a camera. I didn’t own a cell phone then and didn’t predict I ever would. Who wanted to carry a phone around with them?

Turns out, my brother had forgotten his phone, anyway.

I could rhapsodize about how many phones and how many laptops have now passed through our house, the zillions of digital images and words, but really…

This is the most amazing blossom season. In the late afternoons, I read beneath an apple tree while petals fall, the pollinators hum, the spring crickets creak on. The first crop of dandelions has already morphed into gossamer globes of seed. How fast this passes. Sometimes, waking in the night, I get up and read. I am now beyond those baby waking nights, no longer so hungry to rest. Jays bicker over something I’ll never know. The day slips along.

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair…

— Matthew Arnold

Vermont’s Foundation: Freedom and Bread

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

A possum circles in the highway, no doubt startled by my headlights. It’s past midnight, and no soul’s around. I drift into the other lane and let the possum do what it wants to do.

I’m listening to the radio playing the Rolling Stones and thinking of a David Budbill poem I read that afternoon, about Vermont’s colonists and centuries of following folks, seeking freedom and bread. The possum is definitely seeking her or his own version of possum bread, but freedom…? The question looms large. I haven’t far to drive this night, but the words stick with me — bread and freedom — surely two of the main drivers in my life, likely in yours, too.

The peepers are lusty along the Lamoille. The air reeks of wet mud, of that sweet fecundity of spring.

At home again, we lie down with the windows open. I hear the teenagers talking and laughing before they slip into the thickness of young sleep. To ward off the night’s gloom and cold, I’d started a small fire in the wood stove. Through the open window now drifts smoke. In these May days — both hot and chilly — I’ve moved my wood piles, again, as I tend to do, raking the bark and broken bits to dry in the sun. Foolish, perhaps, to keep a fire smoldering while the bedroom windows are open. Or maybe simply a kind of freedom.

What Is June Anyway?

After three weeks of hot weather and drought,

           we’ve had a week of cold and rain,

just the way it ought to be here in the north,

            in June, a fire going in the woodstove

all day long, so you can go outside in the cold

            and rain anytime and smell

the wood smoke in the air.

This is the way I love it. This is why

           I came here almost

fifty years ago. What is June anyway

          without cold and rain

and a fire going in the stove all day?

— David Budbill

“Things Take the Time They Take…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Walking this afternoon, I’m reminded of Sylvia Plath’s line, The winter landscape hangs in balance now… What a long balance it might be. Nonetheless…

A pileated woodpecker swoops down from a branch above my head and disappeared into the woods. I take this as an auspicious sign. Ides of March. More snow moving in. Nonetheless….

Things take the time they take. Don’t
worry.
How many roads did Saint Augustine follow
before he became Saint Augustine?

— Mary Oliver

Light Turning.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Walking into town, I pass a house that has been abandoned for the five years I’ve lived here. Last winter, a vehicle skidded off the road and smashed through the front window. Since then, plywood has covered the front.

There’s a few houses like this in that neighborhood, the paint gray, the windows filthy, tiny yards gone over to weeds or dirt. In the pandemic’s craze, people moved back into a few of these, converting abandoned places into homes again. The driver of a fuel truck stood outside this house yesterday with a young couple, the three of them talking seriously, nodding heads. Sheets of foam insulation leaned against the house. On the side wall, someone had ripped off the dirty plastic and exposed a large square window, its top edge red and blue stained glass. Without stopping, I wondered what else was inside the house.

End of January — and suddenly the sunlight returned in full force. Today may be cloudy, tomorrow, too, maybe for days to come, but the earth is tilting. Slow as spring is, we’re leaning that way.

Don’t say my hut has nothing to offer:

come and I will share with you

the cool breeze that fills my window.

— Ryōkan (trans. John Stevens)

Making Things…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Mid-January, the earth is covered with ice and a crunchy snow a few inches deep. The meditative qualities of walking are swallowed up by fear of slipping or the grinding of hard snow beneath boots. People complain. Complaining is a normal winter’s activity, so are ice and snow, and yet — I’ll reiterate for what seems like the hundredth time again — we’ve slipped out of the cog of normalcy.

What I do:

I finish painting the bathroom (one Sunshine wall, the others Vanilla Ice Cream).

I’m diligent at my work.

My daughter and I go out for coffee, struggle through the CSS profile on financial forms, talk and talk and circle around.

I rise early every morning and rewrite my novel, snip, stitch, elaborate, with my imagination and my hands. In the night, I wake and lay more wood on the fire, pieces of my life arising in words: loons and dahlias and betrayal and desire.

On a Jane Alison bender (Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative), I inter-library-loan Alison’s memoir of how her parents switched partners with another couple, The Sisters Antipodes. Alison writes, “Making things helps make you.”

Sunlight on Sunday, a stiff breeze that jangles the wind chimes.