poetry

Autumn Commences

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I took an unusual route to work this morning, in an attempt to avoid construction, and was rewarded with fog so rich along the valleys my little car crept along, the headlights no doubt mere smears in the white layers.

As I passed through one rise of mountains, my children traveled the other, each of us parting in the early morning, surrounded by infinite layers of pure, wet white. How I would love to jettison a day’s obligations and disappear into those high rocky peaks, the mist melting in the rising sun, the woods whispering their own particular language in my ears.

At my desk, I think of my daughter with her black and silver-keyed clarinet, an instrument new to her, her brown eyes merry with happiness this morning, anticipating music.

First autumn morning
the mirror I stare into
shows my father’s face.

– Murakami Kijo

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Elmore Mountain, Vermont

David Budbill, Poet

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

A few years back, I packed up my manuscript and mailed it across the river to a poet I’d read for years but didn’t know. The poet read my manuscript, emailed me, drove up my icy back road, and had tea with me. My house has many doors, and he came in the back door – the practical one, where I carry in firewood and store cardboard boxes of canning jars. The poet, David Budbill, was not perturbed at all by stepping over domestic clutter.

I am but one among many, many, many who received David’s largesse of heart and generosity. The true midwife of my book, he wrote me that it was “very important” not to let any of my grit be watered down now. Do not cave in, he insisted, to any demands to ameloriate what is hardest, rawest, most true, and beautiful in my writing. He, himself, exemplified this advice in his work.

I’ve cherished his wisdom, as a writer and a woman, like an amulet. May I someday return the favor to another, in gratitude to David.

David Budbill, poet of lust and life. Travel well, crossing over into the next realm.

…The sky is empty. The birds are gone.
Dark. Darker still. And winter coming on.

The sky steals light from both ends of the day.

Four o’clock. Almost dark.

Roy McInnes closes the doors of doors
and stands for a moment in the evening
watching streams of commuters going home,
then he turns and goes home….

And winter coming on.

Providential Kindness, bless us.
Bless all souls alive in Judevine,
and bless the ghosts.

Give us Benediction.

– David Budbill, Judevine

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Leland Kinsey, Vermont Poet

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

A few years ago, when I was a bookseller at The Galaxy in Hardwick, I was reading a book of poetry, Winter Ready, when the poet himself called to order a book for a relative. The book was a gift for a child, and in his polite way, he took great care with the order.

The poet, Leland Kinsey, crossed over into the world beyond last night, no longer part of this slowly-golding-to-autumn realm where the rest of us around here still dwell.

Leland Kinsey, premier among Vermont writers, exquisitely gifted, a man who wrote of the myriad ways the earth giveth – and the earth taketh.

Here’s his lines…

…. His mother’s pickles, whose recipe
he thought would, perhaps should,
die with him. A crock in a cool place
that holds enough for a year.
The ripe smell when fishing
The doubly ripe pieces out.
All this is your heritage now,
as it is preserved here,
make of it what you will.

Leland Kinsey, “An Old Man’s Recipe for Tongue Pickles” in Galvanized

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September, 2016, Vermont

 

Cutting Wood and Soul

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

The first piece of writing I ever published that I made any kind of money from was titled “Maple,” and it was about the intense labor of cutting wood. As a family of sugar makers, for years we cut and split wood at far greater amounts than almost anyone else we knew. Particularly through my older daughter’s life, cutting, stacking, and hauling wood, has been a constant.

In that autobiographical essay, I wrote: “Perhaps it’s that Puritan streak driven so deeply in my soul, but I believe that living demands its toll: that creation is lockstep with destruction. As such, wood forms the crux of our life, the cycle of our turning days, months, years. And yet this rural life has also bequeathed my girl her wild wood.”

Today, undergoing yet more repair of a tooth broken twenty years ago when a piece of firewood fell from a pile stacked too high, I realized, again, our souls may be fierce, but we live and die by the body. It’s a marvel to realize something as small as tooth may do in a body. In the chair today, with my eyes closed, I smelled an antiseptic that reeked of bleach, and then…. cloves. Cloves? Exotically rich, sensual, nourishing. Could there be a greater juxtaposition?

The young endodontist showed me the film of my tooth, its root illuminated like a miniature splinter of lightning. In his pleasant, southern accent, he advised me to think good thoughts. I intend to. But I will also never stack wood higher than my shoulders again.

…When I was ten
we lived in a bungalow in Indianapolis…
Once I got up and went outside.
The trees-of-heaven along the track swam in white mist.
The sky arched with sickle pears.
Lilacs had just opened.
I pulled the heavy clusters to my face
and breathed them in,
suffused with a strange excitement
that I think, when looking back, was happiness.

Ruth Stone, from “What We Have”

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the kitchen window

 

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Last night, I heard the poet Sydney Lea read at the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, and he mentioned being in his seventies is a great time of life. In my forties, myself, I’m in that age justly called rugged – or is it ragged? The age of Dante’s dark woods, I tell myself: a territory to pass through. What’s the best age, anyway? The question begs, perhaps, how rooted we delve into the days we live. Maybe the best answer is Lea’s own, in this love poem.

“My Wife’s Back”

All naked but for a strap, it traps my gaze
As we paddle: the dear familiar nubs
Of spine-bone punctuating that sun-warmed swath…

…Phoebe, osprey, heron, hawk:

Marvels under Black Mountain, but I am fixed
On your back, indifferent to other wonders:
Bright minnows that flared in the shallows,

The gleam off that poor mink’s coat,
Even the fleas in its fur, the various birds
–The lust of creatures just to survive.

But I watch your back. Never have I wished more not to die.

– Sydney Lea

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Woodbury, Vermont

 

Dear David Budbill

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I laughed out loud and cried at David’s tribute, held by a ring of poets and actors on the stage where his work has been performed so many times. In the front row of the balcony, my friend and I talked about our children, and how our lives had shaken down. Later, driving home in the dark, up familiar route 12 I’ve driven so many times – with children, with friends, with family – now alone, not passing another car all those miles, save for an old Volvo station wagon that followed me out of Montpelier before turning off at a house with two lit windows.

Following the narrow sweep of my headlights, I thought of the final speaker’s words: from human suffering rises song. Thinking of David’s own kindnesses to me, and the great wealth of this man’s work and life, I followed those headlights like a unwinding stream of moonlight all the way home.

My children lay in their beds, sleeping. For the longest while, I stood on the balcony in the dark, listening to the frog’s steady chorus, rain falling lightly on my face, and then I, too, went inside and slept.

…These are not the rare and delicate lemon yellow day lilies
or the other kinds people have around their places. This one
is coarse and ordinary, almost harsh in its weathered beauty…

…A plant gone wild and therefore become
rugged, indestructible, indomitable, in short: tough, resilient,
like anyone or thing has to be in order to survive.

From “The Ubiquitous Day Lily of July” by David Budbill

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