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Garlic

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A neighbor stopped by for mint. In the gloaming, we walked through my garden and I offered what I had for her to begin her own garden. Dig this up anytime, take some of this. Then I bent down and pulled some garlic, the new skins white as the moon where my fingers rubbed the dirt loose. A half dozen heads I handed her, this good crop, my soil sprinkling over our fingers.

I remembered the death of a man. He was a gardener, and he was speaking on his deathbed: “You know, I used to sweat sometimes when I was digging. My rheumatism would pull at my leg, and I would damn myself for a slave. And now, do you know, I’d like to spade and spade. It’s beautiful work. A man is free when he is using a spade. And besides, who is going to prune my trees when I am gone?”

– Saint-Exupéry

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

Eyes

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My dear daughters sometimes  look at the books I’m reading and moan, How can you read that? My Struggle? Come on, mom…..

I read on, I read on. In this cool and rainy Vermont July, my nephew and daughter picked wild raspberries this evening, while the clouds darkened ominously and the wind stirred up, and I bolstered my fence against the woodchuck. As a child, summer days wound out into a sheer infinity, but now it seems perhaps tomorrow the children will be back at school and I’ll be stepping into my boots to carry in another armload of wood. Tomorrow seems tucked into today, the years interlaced like a pair of folded hands.

In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes

the hand that waved once
in my father’s eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.

–– Galway Kinnell

Yasuhiro

Yasuhiro

A Small Handful of Soil

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Last fall, I dug potatoes in the school’s garden with the kids on one of those crystalline autumn days rampart with sun and the darkening emerald of summer’s end. One boy reached down and scooped up a handful of soil. With his finger, he stirred through, unearthing a centipede, glacial pebbles, a shard of white quartz. Around us lay the garden opened up for harvest, the stalks torn free from the rows of potatoes, the tomato and cucumber beds emptied of their frost-killed vines. In this sizable sprawl of black earth, this child stared intently into a single handful of dirt.

Today, weeding, I thought of this child again. With what joy he would see what lay in this garden. When I finished what I could do, I stood back and looked over my small measure of order, the vegetable rows surrounded by tiny tiaras of crown vetch. I thought again of this child-sized handful of soil, the dirt now masked under July layers of stalk and vine and straw and leaf. And yet, it’s the soil we always return to, the mother of our sustenance, the ever-changing constant.

But cultivation’s hold is always tenuous. The sense of order and safety it imparts will change if you turn your back on it: the brush grows in, the night comes on, old fears crowd you. It’s a skittering truth….

– Jane Brox

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

Shadows

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

July has reached the point where it’s tipping into August, early summer already flown past. Biking with my daughter along the road last night, I felt the shadows’ coolness, their dimness harboring a deepening darkness.

Nonetheless, growth roars on, the elecampane blooming way up there, above my head.

WITHOUT

we live in a small island stone nation
without color under gray clouds and wind
distant the unlimited ocean acute
lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls
or palm trees without vegetation
or animal life only barnacles and lead
colored moss that darkens when months do
hours days weeks months weeks days hours
the year endures without punctuation…

the sea unrelenting wave gray the sea
flotsam without islands broken crates
block after block the same house the mall
no cathedral no hobo jungle the same women
and men they long to drink hayfields
without dog or semicolon or village square
without monkey or lily without garlic

– Donald Hall

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Photo by Gabriela

Where Once Was a Bitter Fence

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Midsummer now, and I’ve complained ad infinitum about the wild raspberries around the garden, but the garden’s gem this year is the raspberries, delectable and sun-ripe. My daughters are frequently around the edges of the garden, bent to the picking task with bowls in hands. Raspberries have formed the tastier bulk of many meals around here.

Where I had seen a barrier and an aggravation has become nourishment. I’m hardly about to let prickery vines overrun the property, but they’re gaining the upper hand, and the girls and I appear none-the-worse.

Early this morning, I pulled over on the roadside at a pasture where cows were grazing and wild turkeys ambled. I walked a little along the road, frogs cheeping, a hawk circling upward and away. Then I realized before me was an enormous sprawl of scotch thistle – hard and thorny – a veritable roadside fence of weed.

Many clouds rise up
clouds appear to form a fence
holding this couple;
They form layers of a fence
Oh, the layers of that fence.

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