Anne Sexton

A Postcard From Vermont…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

…. might include a redwing blackbird suddenly rising from the stream behind the post office as you emerge from the weed-lined path with your brass key. The bird’s feathers hold the hue of burned-out embers.

Or a crumpled Bud Lite can propped neatly against the cinder blocks of the building’s foundation.

Or maybe cows crossing the road as you’re waiting behind a trash truck, the girls tossing cherry pits out the open windows.

Put your mouthful of words away
and come with me to watch
the lilies open in such a field,
growing there like yachts,
slowly steering their petals
without nurses or clocks.

— Anne Sexton

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Hardwick, Vermont

Other Gods

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

At the dinner table the other night, my older daughter had some questions about the ten commandments. Although she attends a secular public high school, apparently the commandments surfaced in a health class discussion. Transported back to my few elementary school years in Sunday School, I remembered crayoning two suspiciously tombstone-like tablets and a mighty Moses figure. I assured my girls honoring their mother was a key commandment.

But the commandment that stumped her was the second:  Thou shalt have no other god. What the heck could that mean?

We were eating bacon-traded-for-our-syrup from a friend’s pig, an enormous porcine wonder once named Douglass. I had fried the thick fat golden crunchy on the outside, creamy and savory-smoked on the inside. The frost hadn’t yet gotten to my peppers, and with the bacon fat I had sautéed poblanos with my garden onions and garlic and nearly the last of the tomatoes. My younger daughter tore pieces of crusty bread and laid these on our plates.

I suggested: think about what fills your life. What if your life was consumed with the desire to win an Olympic figure skating medal, or insatiably to earn money? Or what if your life was filled with cultivating thousands of acres of commercial corn? Overseeing a small town library? Teaching kindergarten? Or suffused with a quest for something else: gambling, anorexia, heroin? What about Vermeer and his eleven children, the unpaid bakery bill at his death, and the two paintings his wife hocked in exchange for that debt? For better or for worse, isn’t what you fill your life with, and what you pursue, precisely what you kneel before?

There’s an upper window in our kitchen, and at this time of year, sunlight falls down in the late afternoons on our table. Years ago, my parents gave us this table from my girlhood home. The butcher block has held up all these years.

Oh, little girl,
my stringbean,
how do you grow?
You grow this way.

— Anne Sexton

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Montpelier, Vermont

Stopping by the Edge Garden

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

This afternoon, while on my way from here to there, I stopped by a garden. With just a few minutes, I ran down the hill through the crown vetch and looked briefly to see what was growing. Cinquefoil, creamy yellow.

This garden, like so many Vermont gardens, is an edge garden, between a place of domestically cultivated flowerbeds, carefully tended, in the height of bloom, and just beyond this vegetable garden is a wetland with a lilypad-rich pond, where I’ve seen blue heron, deer, an eagle. Between one place and another, the edge is fertility, creation, growth, a joining of one place to another:  bank to water, field to forest, sickness to health, fruit to decay. So, bending over, in two moments of quiet before I hurried back up the hillside to my daughters, I thought to pull a few weeds away from a cucumber plant, and found instead wild cinquefoil thrust over the seedling, so amazingly alive in this unpeopled place I withdrew my hand.

Instead, as I walked back, I snipped a few stalks of wildflowers. The edge is multi-layered, endlessly changing, the brilliant sunlight soon dimmed to night, harborer of sweet wild raspberries, leeches, box turtles and snapping turtles, toads the size of my thumbnail. Today, surrounded by those wildflowers tall as my elbows, I thought, Well enough. Let it be.

My daughter, at eleven
(almost twelve), is like a garden….

Oh, little girl,
my stringbean,
how do you grow?
You grow this way.
You are too many to eat…..

– Anne Sexton

Wildflowers by Molly S.

Wildflowers by Molly S.