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Goldfinch

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, driving too fast on a dirt road, I spun around a corner and heard rocks spitting from the truck tires.  I was in too much of a rush, after too jumbled a day, and I didn’t slow down.  A goldfinch burst before the windshield, then flew up into the maples. Peering over the steering wheel, suddenly slowing, I saw the bird’s underbelly, so yellow it was iridescent, glowing like Rumpelstiltskin’s freshly spun gold.

A flash, nothing more.

That flickering goldfinch, that gleam of beauty, so startlingly unexpected, tore before my vision as a feathered  shrapnel of truth.

At the school’s sixth grade graduation tonight, the speaker handed each child a shiny 2015 penny.  Be truthful, she counseled wisely, like Honest Abe.  Myself, so long past the years of sixth grade, feel my own truth dispersed and muddied among so many humusy layers of living.  And then this goldfinch before my eyes, harbinger of unadulterated truth, pure beauty.  It might have been my heart leaping from chest.

There is only one heart in my body, have mercy
on me.

The brown leaves buried all winter creatureless feet
running over dead grass beginning to green, the first scent-
less violet here and there, returned, the first star noticed all
at once as one stands staring into the black water.

– Franz Wright

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Photo of Pepper by Molly S.

Wild Strawberries

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I received a book of poems in the mail today, and the little girls asked me to read one to them.  Sure, I said, glancing through.  But these are not children’s poems; these poems are smeared with blistering rage, with grief and bloody childbirth.  Feminist poetry?  Or women’s writing?  In what way or what domain is that limited to the female gender?

This evening, the children and I – two girls and a boy all ten and under – walked down the neighbors’ field, a great long stretch of it, the children running ahead of me.  At the bottom, the children knelt and picked wild strawberries, the largest the size of my thumbnail.  Crimson and sharply sweet.  I lay back in a fold of the earth under the blue sky swirled with curled bits of cloud.  All around us, Indian paintbrush was knotted in buds, so I watched the children through waving green stems topped with bits of gold.  My daughter gathered a whole handful of this tiny fruit and offered me the largest.  Mama, try.

Biting a minuscule seed between my teeth, I thought of those poems, my secret stash of nighttime reading.  More than anything else, bearing and raising my children has shaped my life, and so, perhaps, those poems, with their raw grit and embrace of the female body, are women’s writing.  Perhaps the limitation is my fixation, when, instead, the word should be possibility.

female

there is an amazon in us.
she is the secret we do not
have to learn.
the strength that opens us
beyond ourselves.
birth is our birthright.
we smile our mysterious smile.

– Lucille Clifton

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Of Tacos and the Inner Life

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The after school kid topic today was how many tacos were eaten at lunch.  The girls each ate two.  The younger brother ate three.  Another child at the table quit after four. Teacher?  Four, apparently.  A fifth grade boy claimed the prize with eight.  Pondering this impossibility, the girls drew a diagram of how large his stomach might be and sandwiched in eight hand-drawn tacos.  A variation of anatomy, in the elementary school world, complete with graphic illustrations.

Don’t days sometimes seem a collage of pieces, one funkily shaped thing pressed in against another?  In my realm today of concrete things — washing dishes and writing tech bits, things I could hold in my hand — I had a conversation with one person about some of the deepest things in my life, a literal spading up of soul debris.

Aren’t the best novels that way, too, filled with the physicality of action and the deeper layers that turn our lives one way or another?  Surely, we’re shaped by the trees in our yards, maybe the nubs of apples fattening up that we finger every afternoon, or the roads we drive along particular rivers, watching their levels rise and ebb, or the patchwork quilt we smooth over a bed, every morning.  But within this, too, are the murkier regions of desire and raw longing, of resentment’s ice and anger’s torrents, and even when our surface belies a calmness, our inner workings foment.

Writing sifts down through those unclear, swirling layers, and tries to make sense of the impossible, accordions us out so we may see less of a mosh and something resembling sense. Know thyself, Socrates advised.  Writing arrows toward that knowing.

How would eight tacos fit into one boy?  We stretch, children.

THE LAYERS
Stanley Kunitz

…In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Photo by Molly S.

Photo by Molly S.

What Do Women Really Want (besides blueberry pie)?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A houseful of children tonight.  Much swinging in the living room hammock (it’s raining, yes), a discussion at dinner about the two ten-year-old girls running as a joint ticket for president, a revealing of whom everyone’s parents voted for in the last presidential election.

One of the girls asks what I’m writing about, and I hold up a book and say, There’s a folktale in here about what women really want.  So, I ask the girls, What do women want?

They think.   This question is a stumper, no doubt about it.  One of the girls offers, Freedom.  I can see the glint in this child’s eye, the allure of this ten-year-old vision of freedom, not the Janis Joplin version, not anything at all but a clear sunshiny day and an ample bowl of ice cream.  I also see blueberry pie in her gaze, which I know this child adores.

At the end of this strange folktale, the Lady Ragnell is transformed from a hag into a beauty when Sir Gawain grants her the freedom of her own autonomy.

Pose this as a koan:  as women, we can’t obtain what we most desire, without the blessing of our spouse?  Is that a backhanded way of getting exactly what you need, when it’s already in your hand?  Is the story far more complicated, laced through Western centuries of female subjugation and denial, the banishment of childrearing to lowly status or else so sanctified mothering is glorified into absurd heights, a challenge we inevitably will fail?  Why do women so often cling to this notion of Prince Charming in all his glory, bending down on one knee to kiss our hand, as if that magical kiss will shatter our haggardness, transforming our ugly selves into princesses?  Why not demand the prince meet us in the kitchen garden, with everyone’s feet firmly on the ground and hands offered equally over the seeded beds?

Or is the story, instead, far simpler?  Put another way, perhaps what women desire is the depth of work and love, and the tranquility to lie down on the earth and gaze up at clouds scudding along an azure sky.

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Seeds and Sorrow

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

All day long, maple seed pods fluttered down in a spring breeze, a shower of twirling seeds.  Where I live in Vermont, the seasons release easy rain and fierce rain, snow in leafy flakes and snow hard as buckshot.  Last week, the dandelions burst, and all day long, all night long, seeds lifted with their miniature canopies of sail and soared free from their stalks, heading out on their journeys.  Now, maple seeds are thrown in veritable handfuls from the trees and cast into the breeze, floating in an emptied glass of lemonade, on the little daughter’s new sweater left on the porch, against the window glass, into our hair.

June 6th.  Season of renewal, of surging growth.  My daughters and I walked along an abandoned railroad bed this afternoon, bending beneath greenery tenting over the railbed.  Domestic cows, wild geese, a cardinal, the crickets already counting down the days of warmth.

June 6th.  When I was in high school, a French exchange student told me, My grandmother is from Normandy, and she will never forget D-Day.

All day long, those seeds swirled.  All night, while we sleep and dream, and tomorrow morning, too, when the girls wake and wash and eat their sleepy breakfast, while we walk down our driveway to meet the school bus, the girls already thinking of their school day ahead, me holding my coffee and saying, Have a good day, goodbye, goodbye, see you this afternoon, those seeds will still be shedding on our shoulders and hands and before our eyes.  Then, for this year, too, that will be done.

Birthday Cake

….This is the season of mud and trash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, inarticulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another.

Hayden Carruth

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Ode to Wilbur’s Companion

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Oh, pork.  While I spend a great deal of time in the world of words, I also spend an enormous amount of my hours in the world of food.  My daughters often ask, What’s for dinner? and, annoyingly no doubt, I frequently reply, How about great big bowls of nothing for dinner?  Think how easy that would be.  No prepping, no cooking, no cleaning.  No dishes.

My daughters, not surprisingly, hate this answer.

Today, I gardened (to my joy and maybe also the black flies’ rapture, but it’s also consumption-oriented).  I served hummus and crusty olive bread, and I ate the moldy cheese no one else wanted.  Watermelon and apples I diced into pieces for the younger daughter.  From the garden I gathered a plain salad of lettuce for lunch and the older daughter ate it with pickled jalapeños.  All through this day, my younger daughter moans,  I’m so darn hungry……

While I was working at my desk this afternoon, the younger daughter appeared and asked if we were eating Wilbur for dinner.  Not thinking – really not following this line of thought through at all, and definitely not listening to my Charlotte’s Web aficionado child – I said, Yes, resulting in the child turning her back on me and stalking outside.  The older daughter complained I was being insensitive.  I should certainly know the younger daughter loves that pig.  I lifted my eyes from my laptop and said, Tell your sister I think the pig is Helga, and Wilbur’s fine.

The pork chops were succulent and yet crisp, Jung’s two extremes meeting up on our forks.  Afterward, we tossed the bones in a pot and boiled them down for tomorrow’s soup.  I bartered syrup for this meat from an East Hardwick family, and tonight at dinner, I was glad once again to have the providence to live where food is raised and tended and, yes, butchered, because my girls are hungry……

EVERYTHING GOOD BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN

has been written in mud and butter
and barbecue sauce…..

Bless it. We have so little time
to learn, so much…. The river
courses dirty and deep. Cover the lettuce.
Call it a night. O soul. Flow on. Instead.

C.D. Wright

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