poetry

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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Treasures, Literary and Otherwise

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

While I wouldn’t count a generous wage as one of the perks of working at a little library, the benefits are incomparable: kindergarteners who sit at my desk and ask the sharpest (and funniest) questions, then inquire about the status of my gum supply; a light-filled space; unfettered access to inter-library loan; and a mound of donated books for our sale.

Rummaging through the remainders, I pulled out books for people. T. C Boyle novels for a single father, John Holt for a homeschooling family, Reviving Ophelia for a mother of a teenage daughter, herbal remedies for a college student.

These early mornings, I’ve been reading Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ The Harmless People about the Bushmen, in an old Vintage paperback from the fifties, not at all glossy, but practically and well-designed, a book that fits easily into, say, a briefcase or diaper bag.

Here’s a paragraph that illustrates how beautifully and lovingly written is this gem.

Before they went to sleep that night, the two men accepted a bucketful of water as a present. The bucket they would return, but the water was for them alone, an enormous present in the desert, for which they were very grateful. They began to drink from it, scooping the water up with their hands and, later, lifting the bucket to drink from its rim. After that they lay down, naked as they were on the bare ground, close to the fire, with their knees bent, letting as much skin as possible be exposed to the heat. The warm smoke and ashes blew over them and they went to sleep on their sides as Bushmen always must, with one ear on the ground but with the other up and listening, to hear what comes along. Because it was cold they woke up often, and every time they woke they drank, so in the morning only the bottom of the pail had water in it, frozen into a circle of ice.

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Love Poem

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Driving to work yesterday, I listened to the radio, about Derek Walcott, this poet who found himself in the sea and in the light of this world.

Where I am now, spring rampages in with a fierce rush of lengthening days, of light white with snow but suffused with burgeoning warmth. Winter rallies with bitter cold, but each passing week, the harshness of that season dwindles. We will see green again. Spring, while she may linger in her arrival, has never yet failed to delight.

“Love After Love” by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

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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