#books

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

In the Albuquerque airport, I’ve tucked myself into a corner, editing a manuscript and drinking coffee, when suddenly I see the small airport is jammed. I pack up my things. In search of my gate, I ask a man if he’s headed to Chicago. “Houston. We’ve been deplaned from the tarmac, twice, and I’m pretty sure everyone here is about to have a nuclear meltdown.” Edging away, I hear a woman cajole her child to “let daddy figure this out.” The ruddy-faced daddy glares at a monitor.

At the terminal’s far end, I join an elderly couple (retired psychiatrists), a pediatric oncologist, and a mechanic who’s hoping to visit his mother before her open heart surgery. They tell me the news of Biden’s withdrawal.

Our plane has not arrived, and we step to one side of the swirling crowd. The oncologist shares that he’s been a fan of Biden. Such suffering in that family, he says; it changed him. The psychiatrists nod, listening. He tells us that his experimental research department received a flood of funding, but that’s all ceased now, with staff layoffs in anticipation of the election. He plans to retire in a few years and return to Botswana to volunteer. I don’t want to be dismal, he says, but the need for help won’t end.

We spy two pilots, admire their youth — but not too young — and gladly note they disappear through a door towards the tarmac. The loudspeaker voice informs us the pilots will have a short meeting with the cabin crew and then we’ll board. We’re not quite sure what that huddle is about — go team? keep the plane in the air? — and the oncologist muses that airports are one of the few places he’s experienced where strangers keep the social fabric together. No one, he tells us, says anything to strangers on D.C. public transportation.

That does not bode well, I think.

Just before we board, we shake hands and wish each other well. All these matryoshka doll layers in us: I walk down the ramp with the sign maker, who confesses his worries about his mother. Like a kind of magic, then, we’re in the air. Hours later, I land in Burlington, Vermont. Under a crimson full moon, I cross the street. The night sprinklers are watering a swathe of grass. All those dark miles of driving ahead of me. At home, the hydrangeas shine in the moonlight, boughs weighted with blossoms touching the ground.

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Ezra Pound

Hand-me-down mud boots.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

These few days I’ve spent in New Mexico, my mother is a constant presence and absence. She’s powerfully here, in her sunny kitchen or in the stacks of empty flower pots in the garage. Yet, she’s vanished, too. All night, the desert breathes into this house, sage-sweet wind and coyotes barking and the robin songs here, too, like in my Vermont world. These days, the skies have been layered with lightening and sooty storms, golden sun, the blowing gritty sand that scours my skin to softness.

The world far beyond my small family’s sorrows teeters towards deceit and collapse. There’s no inoculation against any spiritual ailment, really. Measles, sure, but never the terrifying largeness of grief or rage, or losing safety or love. Which leads me back to the photo above, my little daughter as she was at our kitchen door, in her hand-me-down mud boots and a handmade cotton dress, carrying stalks of garden-cut kale. A reminder never to sentimentalize or diminish the rugged and real lives we live.

A Pretty Song

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?
This isn’t a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.

— Mary Oliver

The awful rowing towards God.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments
Hardwick, Vermont

My buddy Ben Hewitt writes about waking from a deep sleep where he’s lying in the back of a pickup driven by a woman with bejeweled fingers — but I wake from a dream where I reach under the bed for a bowl of brown rice and curried onions, strings of sautéed chard, diced tomatoes. Who dreams of that? But perhaps I’m dreaming of keeping cake beneath the bed from an old article my friend Dave showed me…. The cat sits in the screened window. Rain falls hard.

In the buttery dawn, my youngest and I walk around town, coffee cup in my hand. The river and brooks have taken over Hardwick again. A man sits on his porch, water a swirl around his house, and I sense he’s been sitting there all night. A year ago, to this day, the town broke apart in a flood.

Again, the river roars, mud-dark, boulders banging. Fall into that, and you’ll drown. The town reeks of clay and rot, the earth’s innards that are better off left unturned.

I’m working these days for a small nearby town Selectboard. This early morning there’s the stream of road crew and public, of the orchardist hired for last year’s FEMA reimbursement — which we’ve not yet received — who arrives in his orange vest. The phone rings and rings. The Selectboard members arrive with donuts and freshly made banana bread and a cheerful Irish Setter. The woman who’s just joined this limping Board (who, really, in their right mind would join a Selectboard these churned-up days?), explains in her calm way precisely her motivation. She’s neither young nor naive and says just simply that the world is falling apart; but this Vermont town doesn’t need to follow that course. In this strangely remarkable day of the world we know and broken badly again, I am caught in an upswell of her plain-spoken and can-do words, her confidence as she sets down that waxed-paper-wrapped sweet loaf. I am aligned. The alternative is narcissism or nihilism or simply foolishness, and I have been waiting for her words.

In this same unexpected morning, I sit with the Selectboard as the rain falls again. They agree on a mending plan which relies on that wing and a prayer of federal money. The town, well-off a year ago, is now running on debt.

In my own one-woman world, standing in the dark against my house that rainy night and listening to the river’s roar increase and gain, I especially miss the shelter I once had in a marriage when the world’s chaos smacks into my face, as happens more and more these days. But fiercely pounding waters are never one single thing; even the next morning, bleary-eyed and soaked, I can’t help but marvel at the creamy orbs of blooming hydrangeas, the gold rudbeckia. Drinking my bitter coffee, I think of Anne Sexton’s poem “The Awful Rowing Towards God.” I once chose to dig my oars into turbulent waters and pull myself and my daughters to dry land. Now my youngest, shimmering with the pollen of young womanhood, drives, her eyes wary over the dirty water.

Oh us, all of us, in our little boats, our dinky cars and pickups, our great complicated lives. These mud-choked whirlpools, the fallen trunks smashing into rubble, the rushing waters that have not yet stilled. Which way will we row? Remarkable, all of it, remarkable.

… I am rowing, I am rowing,
though the wind pushes me back
and I know that that island will not be perfect,
it will have the flaws of life,
the absurdities of the dinner table,
but there will be a door
and I will open it…

— Anne Sexton

The natural course of things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Dawn, I’m barefoot in the dewy garden, gathering peas, the world ignited. By the time my daughter and I meet in the kitchen, a little after five as she drinks coffee and heads to work, gray has skimmed over the sky, rain rain rain pushing in. (Side note: Red Sky at Morning, Richard Bradford’s novel, is a terrific classic novel, the former husband of my very long ago nursery school teacher, somewhere in Santa Fe….)

A year ago, heavy rains flooded much of my state. As I left Greensboro yesterday afternoon, I passed a village resident digging a trench with a shovel, some preventative channeling. About this time last year, I realized I knew a number of people who were driving around with shovels in their cars or pickups.

We are now in midsummer. Around two sides of our house, my garden grows — cottage roses and cup plant and phlox — and the wild rallies on the other two sides — jewel weed and box elder and goldenrod twine around porch railings, brush against the clapboard. Snip snip must be done, and yet somehow hasn’t yet. The groundhogs multiply, run beneath our chairs on the deck. I wonder about those foxes, about the natural course of things, wonder again, Well, what do I know? What will happen will happen….

Finding a Thread.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

On my way home, I stop at Number Ten Pond. The water temperature is at that sweet spot, exactly perfect — and how often do you touch perfect? — and I wade right in. A woman stands in the pond, two children splashing around her. She laughs when the minnows bite her toes.

I swim far. In the pond’s center, I float on my back. With my eyes closed, my mind’s eye turns red, with blood or sunlight, who knows, and I’m no longer sure which way is up or down, water or sky. I’m distant enough from shore that only the loon call reaches me. By the summer’s end, these swims will add up to an invisible chain of experience: of water and weather, of whatever language drifts my way. July here, just a handful of fleeting days. 

"Everything Is Made Of Labor"
Farnaz Fatemi

The inchworm’s trajectory:
pulse of impulse. The worm
is tender. It won’t live
long. Its green glows.
It found a place to go.
Arrange us with meaning,
the words plead. Find the thread
through the dark.

The limits of what we do.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Friday night, driving home along a familiar road from visiting friends, I stop by the elementary school. Solstice, the Strawberry Moon, the daylight lingers, and the dusk is long, multiple hues of blue. No one’s there, of course. I follow the path along the wetlands. Shimmering with lilypads and twilight, the water chirrups, sings, buzzes. Fish leap and splash. I loiter, and the dusk closes in. Still, I keep walking, following the path through the brushy woods up a slight hill, so I can get to the other side.

In my twenties, I had a tendency to get lost in the night woods, stumbling off the path. Years before cell phones, we were always searching for flashlights with working batteries, to visit somebody in a remote cabin. But I’m in familiar territory, and I take my time, in this bowl of evening, letting the cacophony of the wild chorus diminish my stringy thoughts.

I haven’t been back here for a good long while, but this school and the town and the library where I worked was a warm place, with its own complicated stories, sure. Those were the years when my life fell apart. I pause, hoping to see the quicksilver flash of a fish. Across the wetlands, a single vehicle rolls along the road. Maybe it’s the passage of time, or the evening’s mellifuous beauty, but I see suddenly that I was following two strands of my story in those years. I was leaving my husband (and for months, I wasn’t at all certain how to do that), and I was also recreating my life (and how exhilarating and hard that was, too.) I’ve written about my struggle with addiction; when I began to lift that veil, my fierce hunger quickened for what I had wanted all along — to pursue my own creative and often dicey life. In this throbbing evening, I sense the limits of language, that words fail here, that to divide creation and destruction into two words, held in two hands, is illusory.

The fish I didn’t see smacked through the water. Fireflies winked around me as I threaded my way back to civilization in the dark.

“Train Ride”

All things come to an end;
small calves in Arkansas,
the bend of the muddy river.
Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever.
They go on forever, the swamp,
the vine-choked cypress, the oaks
rattling last year’s leaves,
the thump of the rails, the kite,
the still white stilted heron.
All things come to an end.
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever,
the wide dry field of geese,
a man stopped near his porch
to watch. Release, release;
between cold death and a fever,
send what you will, I will listen.
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.

— RUTH STONE