David Budbill

Two Decades Ago

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I haven’t lived in a town in what to me is a very long time – over twenty years – and in those twenty years, I went from newly married, to raising two daughters, maple sugaring on a scale that become way oversized for two adults, and wrote a book. I did a few other things, too.

Oddly, living in a small town again, I’ve been given a glimpse back into my female self I might not have gotten before. What’s different from when I was twenty is that I’m a mother now, a writer, a woman who knows her way around a garden and what to do with garlic scapes. Useful things.

I have wrinkles and a great tangle of gray, but I’m no longer afraid of the dark. In an odd way, what I once thought would be so difficult – uprooting – has evolved into one of the easier phases of my life. Or maybe it’s just July, and the greenery is mellifluous. Then again, maybe this is one of the easier parts, and the children aren’t bickering now.

You got to understand: here
Winter stays six months a year—
Mean, mean winters and too long.
Ninety days is what we get, just

Ninety days of frost free weather….

From David Budbill’s “Summer Blues”

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What Is

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

When I was in graduate school and teaching an intro creative writing course, I was walking down the library steps one afternoon and suddenly realized I knew almost nothing about writing. Why nouns and verbs, for instances? Why anything for that matter?

I stood there in the rain pondering the difficulty of creative work. I also guessed it would always be hard for me.

That, at least, decades later I now see, was one thing I was right about in my life. Since then, maybe I’ve gleaned one or two things: sometimes less is stronger, and sometimes you need to push and push, going for broke.

Here’s a poem from David Budbill’s lovely posthumous collection.

Say what you see.
Get it down right.

Accuracy is plenty.

What’s here
is good enough.

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Rock On…..

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Anyone who knows my daughters and myself knows our story of moving from this beloved house to another; our path not wholly determined. These days, in the rush and glory of Vermont spring, we are still fully here, reveling in the first sighting of trillium blooms, our familiar dirt road we have walked and biked thousands of times. This spring, surrounded by the upheaval of change and illness, reminds me yet again that the salvation of our world is through children: in the steady joy of trampoline jumping and chocolate-egg-with-sweet-cream-yolk eating.

Yesterday, standing outside the library with another adult, listening to the raucous chorus of Woodbury’s wetland peepers, far down below the school’s garden, concealed in the thick brush, we heard children’s voices. As we listened, into the song of frogs and robins and sparrows wound peals of laughter. On and on…..

Here’s the beginning of a poem one friend wrote, and another sent me today:

Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh marigold,
this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan melting
to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, this life…

– David Budbill, “The First Spring of Green”

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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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Here.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In the internet world, hardly anyone ever writes where they live. Who claims to be from Maple Falls, Washington? Or Ivy, Virginia? On my hillside, in West Woodbury, Vermont, the trilliums have pushed up but are folded over, awaiting warmth to spread their velvety petals. This afternoon, the sun shines undiluted, while the maples host those raucous robins.

In this April’s Poetry Month, I’ve heard Vermont poets read about desire and loss and joy, and about drinking cold sap, cedar waxwings huddled in a snowstorm, hand-churned ice cream, lost rings….

All this violence: wars and cruelties…
now as always
back to the beginning of time….

Yet and still every day the sun rises,
white clouds roll across the sky,
vegetables get planted and grow,
and late in the afternoon someone
sits quietly with a cup of tea.

– David Budbill, “Little Poem Written at Five O’Clock in the Morning”

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Woodbury, Vermont, April afternoon

Midwinter Lady Moon

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Winter moon… in my novel, the Lovely Lady Moon appears from the beginning so frequently I think of her as a character, too. The other night, I lay reading in bed for the longest time, and then my brother started that texting thing again. He has this way of texting like no one else I know: as if he wraps his deepest, pithiest, and often funniest words in a rag, knots it up with twine and rock, and chucks it over the Connecticut River to me. Afterwards, I lay in the cold room under a thick wool blanket, staring through that uncurtained window, thinking of those words of my brother’s, his phrases of what had given him a sweet, rare joy that day.

I learned to follow the moon’s phases all those myriad March nights of sugaring, as I hurried back and forth from the house to the sugarhouse, over treacherous ice and sucking mud, beneath her radiance…. which channeled into all those nights I was awake with nursing or sick children, my eyes watching the moon as she rose and arced and descended through my slender view of the cosmos.

Those nights, in my rural house, I wondered about other women all over the planet who were awake with their babies, feeding and tending these tiny beings, their faces turned up to Lady Moon’s pristine presence – utterly familiar, uncrackably mysterious, infinitely beyond the touch of our hands. Steady as clockwork, infallible, she beams on: a beacon.

Bright Moon

                                                                after Buson  #843

Cold is the bright moon
All those trees
and this vast sky.

David Budbill, from AFTER THE HAIKU OF YOSA BUSON

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Photo by Molly S./West Woodbury, Vermont