Hayden Carruth

Pre-election. Cows.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

November 2, and chatter is all about midterms and the lingering balmy and dry weather. Variables.

For whatever mysterious reason, I keep thinking of Hayden Carruth’s “Cows at Night” poem, which I’ve surely quoted here, perhaps numerous times over the years. This weekend, the moon waning, I drove home on a back road after dinner with friends. In the rural dark, I passed intermittent houses, windows glowing. Where I’d been was hot, so I drove with the sunroof open, in my thin sweater, the scent of woodsmoke drifting in with the breeze, my head filled with a killer live blues band. But where my road parts left, I kept driving, through the village mostly closed up, and to the town forest where I parked.

I’m mostly not afraid of the dark except when I’m terrified. I’ve lived a whole adult life to write this—mostly not afraid except when I tremble with fear—for the immeshed reasons of experience and will and desire that spiral into all our lives. In the thin starlight, I walked along the path, the woods redolent with fallen leaves. Where the path edged along a field, I paused and placed my hand against a white pine, listening, listening. Were the cows yet in the field? The night opened my eyes wide. Yes, indeed, the cows, shifting and chewing, steady.

The Cows at Night

The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the mist
soon after dark, leaving for light

faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.

Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist

of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and the roadside willows
opening out where I saw

the cows. Always a shock
to remember them there, those
great breathings close in the dark.

I stopped, and took my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad

and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them–forty
near and far in the pasture,

turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad

because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.

But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how

in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then

very gently it began to rain.

“The world is a complex fatigue.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

August appears, and I’m at work Saturday morning, trudging around a lake in a thickety forest with some of my favorite people in town, talking work and books and the edginess of this fleeting life, the puzzling conundrums of what people do.

Below, the Hayden Carruth poem I’ve posted before around August 1, during the years I’ve written in this space. Every year, when I read this poem again, different lines pop out. Here, “The world is a complex fatigue.” If I began a list of things I learned in my year (now, year and some) of surviving cancer and cancer treatments, gracious, I would keep writing and writing. The cats would not be fed this morning. The blueberries would not be picked.

But to return to August…. June, July, August, in my way of reckoning, these are Vermont’s high holy months, the long days of sweet roses and waving rudbeckia, the welcomeness of ice on your tongue, walking in twilight, the loveliness of sunlight chips and loons on pond water. Those worn clichés — savor every day, know your luck — are true of course, in the way that truth is multitudinous — in the way that Mac Barnett notes that Be Kind might be a given starting place, but not a plot. And human life, of course, is plot, plot, plot. Often, not of our own making.

Story, of course, is where I’m headed. These midsummer days, the glossiest greens already fading. As I’ve done for years, I hold to the strands that keep me sane in this world illusory and fragile and heartstoppingly thrumming with might far beyond any one or two or few of us… the chords of this mortal life. The gritty and sometimes joyous labor of writing, of walking in the world, the domesticity of family and friends. Brew coffee, weed the garden, ponder the sky.

AUGUST FIRST
by Hayden Carruth

Late night on the porch, thinking
of old poems. Another day’s
work, another evening’s,
done. A large moth, probably
Catocala, batters the screen,
but lazily, its strength spent,
its wings tattered. It perches
trembling on the sill. The sky
is hot dark summer, neither
moon nor stars, air unstirring,
darkness complete; and the brook
sounds low, a discourse fumbling
among obstinate stones. I
remember a poem I wrote
years ago when my wife and
I had been married twenty-
two days, an exuberant
poem of love, death, the white
snow, personal purity. now
I look without seeing at
a geranium on the sill;
and, still full of day and evening,
of what to do for money,
I wonder what became of
purity. The world is a
complex fatigue. The moth tries
once more, wavering desperately
up the screen, beating, insane,
behind the geranium. It is an
immense geranium,
the biggest I’ve ever seen,
with a stem like a small tree
branching, so that the two thick arms
rise against the blackness of
this summer sky, and hold up
ten blossom clusters, bright bursts
of color. What is it — coral,
mallow? Isn’t there a color
called “geranium”? No matter.
They are clusters of richness
held against the night in quiet
exultation, five on each branch,
upraised. I bought it myself
and gave it to my young wife
years ago, in a plastic cup
with a 19cent seedling
from the supermarket, now
so thick, leathery-stemmed,
and bountiful with blossom.
The moth rests again, clinging.
The brook talks. The night listens.

Dad, at 89.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

In the summer of 1980, my parents had the summer off. Dad was a college teacher, and my mother, an RN, was encouraged to take unpaid time as the hospital census was low. My parents owned a Jeep, and my dad loaded sleeping bags and two tents in an oilskin on the luggage rack, and secured the bulk with bungee cords. From New Hampshire, my parents headed west with their three kids.

Now, older than my parents were at that time, I wonder what the heck my parents were searching for. As a kid, of course, you simply go with the family flow, show up at the picnic table and eat chili from a plastic bowl. As a writer, I know that all life is propelled by desire, for that bowl of chili, for the wilderness my parents loved, for the far murkier desires that lurk in a human heart. We were never a Bobbsey Twin family (although good lord how I longed for that, a long-quelled desire), but three of us grew up and created our own complicated lives, never far from the wilderness.

Today, my old man is 89, a remarkable age. I woke thinking of him on one of those summer trips, back in the world before cell phones and internet, when no one knew where the five of us were, just us—dad, mom, the three kids—rattling around in that Jeep. Dad always packed tools, and he fixed our vehicle along the way. High up in the Wyoming mountains one summer, it was cold as heck. He got up before any of us, brewed coffee on the Coleman stove and made buttered toast. He unzipped the tent and handed in toast and hot coffee. Stay in your sleeping bags until it warms, he said. We’d been on the road for weeks by then. He was unshaven, bundled in a jacket, and he kept that makeshift hearth of the Coleman stove burning, feeding us toast. Happy birthday, dad. ❤️

And the Hayden Carruth poem that reminds me of my parents…

Birthday Cake

For breakfast I have eaten the last of your birthday cake that you
had left uneaten for five days
and would have left five more before throwing it away.
It is early March now. The winter of illness
is ending. Across the valley
patches of remaining snow make patterns among the hill farms,
among fields and knolls and woodlots,
like forms in a painting, as sure and significant as forms
in a painting. The cake was stale.
But I like stale cake, I even prefer it, which you don’t
understand, as I don’t understand how you can open
a new box of cereal when the old one is still unfinished.
So many differences. You a woman, I a man,
you still young at forty-two and I growing old at seventy.
Yet how much we love one another.
It seems a miracle. Not mystical, nothing occult,
just the ordinary improbability that occurs
over and over, the stupendousness
of life. Out on the highway on the pavement wet
with snow-melt, cars go whistling past. 
And our poetry, yours short-lined and sounding
beautifully vulgar and bluesy
in your woman’s bitterness, and mine almost 
anything, unpredictable, though people say
too ready a harkening back
to the useless expressiveness and ardor of another
era. But how lovely it was, that time
in my restless memory.
This is the season of mud and thrash, broken limbs and crushed briers
from the winter storms, wetness and rust,
the season of differences, articulable differences that signify
deeper and inarticulable and almost paleolithic
perplexities in our lives, and still
we love one another. We love this house
and this hillside by the highway in upstate New York.
I am too old to write love songs now. I no longer
assert that I love you, but that you love me,
confident in my amazement. The spring
will come soon. We will have more birthdays
with cakes and wine. This valley
will be full of flowers and birds.

Living in the Edge.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

As part of my heal-from-cancer and keep-the-cancer-from-returning approach, I borrow my daughter’s yoga map on Thursday mornings and walk through the cemetery and along Little League field to the village. The studio is above the town’s coffee shop. The windows frame the town’s main intersection of routes 14 and 15, the Lamoille River, flanked by July’s burgeoning green.

As I lie on the polished maple floor, the sound of the traffic comes and goes. This calmness reminds me of those years I lived in Brattleboro, pre-internet, when the main source of my twenties’ activities was walking to the public library or a favorite bar, hiking, or hanging out with my roommates in the house we rented, running our mouths about the state of the world. There was a lot of laughter, a whole lot of discussion about morals and relativity.

This particular Thursday is the anniversary of the floods in 2023 and 2024, exactly a year apart. The class leader repeats a theme of in the edge, that fertile and sticky place between terrains. I think of this summer’s profuse wildflowers – trefoil and asters and Canada lilies – that spread between the river and the fields. Afterwards, I spread out my notebooks and papers and laptop in the coffee shop, plunge into a hard piece of work. I’ve no illusions that yoga will set me floating down any peaceful river. The edge, that complicated habitat, has long been my domain. Friends appear and tell me they’ve sold their house, are pulling up stakes and heading overseas. Around me, people come and go, talking and eating, figuring out or not figuring out parts of their lives.

Later, at home, the catbirds screech. A robin perches on the porch railing and studies me. The woodchucks scurry under the steps from den to woodpile, or have they slowed to a who-gives-a-damn saunter?

Winter, the edge terrain is a cold beast. July, I’m all in…

“Not so much a game
as a sphere,
a mystery.
Held up to light,
a small hole
into another dimension.” ~ Ruth Stone

A sense of urgency…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My youngest and I are watching a track-and-field race in the Olympics when a commentator remarks that a runner needs to up her sense of urgency to medal. In the humid night, the fan whirring through the crickets’ amped-up August songs, I keep riffing on the sense of urgency… My god, what does that actually mean?

Early August, and I always remember Hayden Carruth’s poem “August 1,” its line: The world is a/complex fatigue. Which perhaps sums up these days, so humid the yellow coreopsis flowers gleam, the cats sprawl on the kitchen floor, hungry for coolness. This summer has been fat with growth, the butternut and walnut trees I planted seven years ago spreading into their own canopy, already offering shade for me to lie beneath, as I read in the late afternoons.

Someday, perhaps, I’ll look back at this year as it’s own of kind of waiting — which way will this world tip? Even as I’m busy, busy with my urgency of work and gardening, my perpetual lists, of finish these three projects and then paint the back of the house, the outside world burrows in. Some of this is our own story, as my daughter heads back to college soon, but some are my own observations — the two battered cars crammed along the riverbank from the last flood, the perpetual national dialogue — and my wondering, which way might this go?

Urgency, raw want. At the farmers market, I see my daughters’ father across the field, appeared again from wherever he’s hidden. I hold a hot cardboard box of dumplings while the market crowd swirls around me. I turn to talk with a friend and when I look back again, he’s disappeared. Meanwhile, dumplings and curry in my hands: the urgency of eating, the words and life we’ll share over this savory meal, this evening, these moments.

August First

Late night on the porch, thinking

of old poems. Another day’s

work, another evening’s,

done. A large moth, probably

Catocala, batters the screen,

but lazily, its strength spent,

its wings tattered. It perches

trembling on the sill. The sky

is hot dark summer, neither

moon nor stars, air unstirring,

darkness complete; and the brook

sounds low, a discourse fumbling

among obstinate stones. I

remember a poem I wrote 

years ago when my wife and

I had been married twenty-

two days, an exuberant

poem of love, death, the white

snow, personal purity. now

I look without seeing at

a geranium on the sill;

and, still full of day and evening,

of what to do for money,

I wonder what became of

purity. The world is a 

complex fatigue. The moth tries

once more, wavering desperately

up the screen, beating, insane,

behind the geranium. It is an

immense geranium,

the biggest I’ve ever seen,

with a stem like a small tree

branching, so that the two thick arms

rise against the blackness of

this summer sky, and hold up

ten blossom clusters, bright bursts

of color. What is it — coral,

mallow? Isn’t there a color

called “geranium”? No matter.

They are clusters of richness

held against the night in quiet

exultation, five on each branch,

upraised. I bought it myself

and gave it to my young wife

years ago, in a plastic cup

with a 19cent seedling

from the supermarket, now

so thick, leathery-stemmed,

and bountiful with blossom.

The moth rests again, clinging.

The brook talks. The night listens.

August: Complex Fatigue

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

On this August evening, a sparrow flies out of the wild raspberries along my walk and startles me just the slightest. Stunned a little from its flight through the leaves and small prickles, the sparrow fumbles from foot to foot on the path and then rises up on its wings and disappears. The swifts are out, too.

A downpour has fallen and the humidity has thickened right up again. I walk through the village, and folks are hanging out on porches. A three-quarters moon hangs over the empty high school soccer field, stunning. I’d write that it’s otherworldly in its beauty — but in this slow, sticky night it’s hard to imagine a sweeter world, even this one chockfull with chaos.

In the heat, tempers are either short or silly. Tomorrow is Vermont’s primary, so much fervor, and I wonder what all that might come to. In the evening, I talk to my cat, a tête-à-tête about why he cowers at the slightest noise, as if the house might be under attack by coyotes. You’re a housecat, I remind him, one of the most pampered creatures on the planet. He looks at me, poor ignorant thing that I am, and wisely keeps his ears pressed down and low like a spooked owl.

August. Time to share again one of the loveliest poems.

The world is a 

complex fatigue. The moth tries

once more, wavering desperately

up the screen, beating, insane,

behind the geranium. It is an

immense geranium,

the biggest I’ve ever seen,

with a stem like a small tree

branching, so that the two thick arms

rise against the blackness of

this summer sky, and hold up

ten blossom clusters, bright bursts

of color.

Hayden Carruth, “August First”