poetry

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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Wedding Dress

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

As little girls, my sister and I played pretend in a pink polyester dress and musty-smelling man’s dinner jacket and clomped around the house in my mother’s high heeled wedding shoes, with the implicit expectation someday our small feet would fit into those shiny and coveted heels.

For my feet, not so. My grown-up women’s feet are size five, my older daughter’s size eleven.

Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I believed in a 1950s-framework of a long marriage, two or three children primarily reared by myself as mother, a college education, and a stable and possibly sedate life. It was a vision of life I was doomed to abysmally fail.

While those values lay deeply in my culture, they weren’t particularly in my own childhood home. Unlike every other family in the small New Hampshire town I grew up in, my parents were happiest packing up our old green Jeep and camping all summer on the cheap in national parks west of the Mississippi River. We spent our best hours cooking on a Coleman stove with our kitchen stuff in cardboard boxes, playing Hearts by lantern light and reading used books at the picnic table. “Leave It to Beaver” is a concept I culturally grasp, but I’ve never watched an episode, and I’m willing to bet my siblings haven’t, either.

So when my daughters discovered my wedding dress while cleaning a closet the other day, marveling that its size will never fit either of them, I laughed and told them it was just as well. Each of them can stitch or discover their own attire.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is one that sings.

– Wendell Berry, “Poetry and Marriage”

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On our way to a performance of “Little Women,” we took a detour. Hardwick, Vermont

 

No Boundaries

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Annie Dillard in The Writing Life has these lines: One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time…. give it, give it all, give it now…. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Yesterday, Burlington was the city of blooming trees, countless petals strewn over lawns and car rooftops. The fragrance of freshly-turned bark mulch reminded me of playing beneath the neighbors’ rhododendrons when I was a little girl, and how wide and endlessly wonderful the world appeared then. As if everywhere I walked, something new and marvelously unexpected would emerge, like the word biodegradable, strong and full of magic possibilities.

At the end of a sultry day, I drove my little silver car home beneath charcoal-smudged clouds, through raindrops one-by-one illuminated by sunlight.

One flowering fruit tree alone would have been stupendous. I traveled from the lake through the wide valley, deep into the mountains, and arrived home where the apple tree before our house had opened its white and crimson-hearted blossoms while I was absent. The girls sprawled on the porch, waiting for me.

On the rain-sprinkled earth, we stood talking, inhaling the sweetly scented sonata of opening petal, damp dirt, ruby-throated hummingbird: summer’s largesse.

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Mini Road Trip

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Last night, as my younger daughter was getting into bed, her sister says, Want to go on a field trip?

In the dark , we drive around the mountain on our dirt road, passing precisely no other vehicle, and suddenly the nearly full moon appears in the sky, luminescent, unearthly, so near I imagine I could stretch out my hand and touch this gleaming orb.

While my older daughter leans against the car hood, busy with her Cannon, the younger girl and I admire the constellations, the night’s darkness ameliorated by the moon’s brilliance. Cold for May, I tug my down jacket tight.

The peepers sing. We breathe in the aroma of wet soil, standing at a hayfield’s edge, with no need or rush to go anywhere at all, drenched under star and moonlight.

 

Before the white chrysanthemum
the scissors hesitate
a moment.

– Buson

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Dede’s Book

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A day of cold rain, when I think of Janisse Ray’s line: Some days, all day, rain falls.  Driving home, I take a detour and follow the river, swollen threateningly along its banks, grabbing at trees still barren with winter.

All through graduate school in Bellingham, Washington, I wrote of flooding rivers, clogged septic tanks, the persistence of moisture.

In Montpelier this afternoon, the lights are already glowing on, and it’s poetry month. Poetry: not of sterilized honey, but nourishing, sweet and yet filled with the debris of dead bees.

At Bear Pond Books, I buy Dede Cummings’ beautiful new book of poetry. Oh Dede. On this April day fattening itself with water, wisely using the sodden gloom, readying for the splendor of blooms, I stand in the aisle, devouring her words. A friend of mine, reading a new book of Mary Oliver’s, said she always found poems she knew were written just for her. Then she said, But maybe many others think that way, too.

Marriage

I am not the cause of your misery
I am peepers in springtime in the dark pond
I am footsteps and shadow approaching on the dark road
I watch for salamanders but none of them are crossing on this dry night.

I measure my steps, and I count my dreams:
I am driven home by drizzle, by children.

A small vase of crocus blossoms
you left on the cutting board this morning
reminds me of what we once had.

– Dede Cummings, To Look Out From

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