poetry

Searching by Starlight

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Three summers ago, we returned from a three days long Amtrak ride – Lamy, New Mexico to Albany, New York, and then a three-hour drive home – and I ran into the garden through the car headlights, before coming into the house. The hydrangea had spread magnificently; the tomatoes lay tucked in their leaves, heavy, ripe.

We had been gone for most of the summer, nearly six weeks, first to stay with my sister who was not well that summer, and then on the only trip I’ve taken with both my daughters to the southwest, where I was born. Under intense pressure that summer, by our return of the four of us, it was clear our marriage was fissured.

Nearly three years later, I was in the garden by starlight last night, the fireflies flickering so high in the surrounding treetops they merged with the constellations. Even in the dark, my feet know this path intimately.

After midnight, I finished Alice Hendan-Zuckermayer’s book, about the willing and unwilling moves of her family, driven by economics, which I know so well, and by a world at war, which I have been so fortunately spared. Why read anyway? You might as well ask why think? why desire? why LIVE? In my midnight garden, with the bursts of dandelions already going to seed, it was me and Alice. She ended her book with these lines from Ecclesiastes:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…. a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together, a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get and a time lose, a time to keep…

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Giggles, Girls, Growing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

After a week of just too much, I sat knitting in the back row at the Galaxy Bookshop last night, surrounded by some adults I knew, and some I didn’t, listening to the four poets read in a round robin. The poetry and the poets all flowed into each other – stanzas about Garage Sale DayZ and an expectant father slid into a particularly exquisite love poem by Sean Prentiss.

Afterward, I spoke with his wife and admired how their baby girl smiles with her whole tiny, joyful body. In the warm June evening, scented with the town’s profuse lilacs, I lay on the grass under a sugar maple at the elementary school, waiting for my sixth grader at her first dance.

June’s blooming beauty – Siberian iris, deep purple lupine – and the children are happy. Beneath my palms, I could feel the earth herself, free from winter’s grip, breathing.

Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever….
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever;
the wide dry field of geese…
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.

– Ruth Stone, from “Train Ride”

Handmade Dresses

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the process of moving from one house to another, my daughters and I are turning every closet inside out. I urge the girls to pass along what they don’t want: books, outgrown clothing, costume jewelry…. and then I pack away the tiny baby dresses my mother sewed, sealing them up in a cardboard box and writing keep.

We’re three females going about our lives, moving from one house to another, and I keep reminding myself lucky, lucky, as I listen to VPR, the airwaves filled with so many people and so much upheaval, the tenor of the country and of the world uncertain, fraught.

Lucky, we are, moving not far, to a house surrounded by blooming perennials.

Here’s a fragment from a poem I found in a box, given to me by a friend, when my little girl wore those dresses.

…Even as his hands broke
the earth he worked, his heart
was fallow, asleep…
I turned and told him,
Yes. Plant. Plant everything
as if you had eternity
for you will die tomorrow.

– Arra Lynn Ross, “He Comes and Asks to Plant”

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Montpelier, Vermont

G.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

After my second daughter was born via caesarian, I lay numb from my shoulders down while the surgeon stitched me up. I was beyond ebullient, full of joy but also a steady kind of peace. She had crossed over into us, into our living, chattering, very full world.

The surgeon and his assistant, working, talked about their long Memorial Day weekend, most of it apparently spent in the garden. Grass grows crazy everywhere in Vermont, except sometimes where you want it most. The sheer normalcy of talking about tomato varieties was enormously reassuring. l felt suspended, finished with a hard pregnancy, not quite yet in the realm of mothering an infant, poised between no longer pregnant and not yet nursing this little one. A rare, unique moment.

Later, looking at photos, I was amazed by the sheer mechanics strapped and needled into me for that surgery. My memories are only of gossamer wellness, rays of rainbow radiance with the very heart this tiny six-pound being. Such incredible, utterly amazing good fortune.

Happy birthday, daughter.

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back    may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

– Lucille Clifton, “Blessing the Boats

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The Day Before The Birth Day

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Exactly 12 years ago on May 30, I was standing very pregnant at the bottom of our driveway, and about a dozen ATVs roared by, excessively fast and noisy. Within me, my baby abruptly flipped, and I pressed my hands over this baby I had yet to meet, face-to-face. The next morning, we saw each other, tiny girl infant and me.

I always think of that moment as the first time I held and comforted this daughter, wrapped my hands around her, loving her, the first time I began to know this child was mine, small being who would spend her first years in our arms.

…the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow
…this poem
is a political poem is a war poem is a
universal poem but is not about
these things this poem
is about one human heart this poem
is the poem at the end of the world

– Lucille Clifton

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Living the Dream

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

My friend’s mother has a phrase we repeated when we dwelled in the Realm of Raising Toddlers: after happiness comes tears.

After playing with sand, a spat over ownership of a small red shovel – as if the earth’s continued rotation depended on who held that plastic scoop.

Yesterday morning, I passed my friend’s once-upon-a-toddler driving his Toyota with two bicycles strapped on the roof, while my once-upon-a-toddler drove the opposite way in her Toyota, heading to her final days of high school.

We are long past the short, declarative sentences of small children, deeply into the lyricalness of years upon years unfolding. Punctuation is an illusion – toss it out and let the days and nights unspool….. happiness… tears… a stuffed toy rabbit worn down through affection… mason jars of crimson and gold tomatoes with fat emerald handfuls of basil… children lying on sparse grass beneath a maple tree, staring up at breeze-trembling leaves, wondering….

We’ll never mow the grass, hardly ever
rake the leaves. Adopt a goat for the lawnmowing
and squirt her milk into strong tea….
moonlight clothes snap
out on the line, extended
under stars.

– Megan Buchanan, from “Dreamlife” in Clothesline Religion

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