poem

Keep Reaching.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Dark as a pocket or the inner chambers of my heart — so goes these December nights. The nights descend earlier, more afternoon than evening. I randomly meet friends on Main Street with the darkness kicking around my ankles. We step into a community center, pulling off our coats and hats and talking about random things — the price of gas, the upcoming holidays. For those who don’t live in a northern climate, a public building in Vermont sometimes has a curtain just the inside the door to stave off winter’s wind and snow. I push aside the curtain, and we step into a well-lit room.

It’s a simple/not simple thing. We eat bowls of hot soup and chunks of fresh bread at a long narrow table. A couple I’ve never met sits beside me with a brand-new infant, gustily sucking. I refrain from bending my head and breathing in the child’s milky scent.

Darkness presses against the windows as we talk and keep talking, and eventually the three of us are all leaning our elbows on the table, our heads propped on hands, spent. People appear, say hello, offer a hug, disappear, and still we’re talking about what might happen with the schools and our old parents and the persistence of memory from early childhood. How do we reconcile our stories? Escape or rewrite our stories?

Eventually, sodden with sleepiness, I pull on my boots and step out. The weather has turned, and the sidewalk is slick. I head out of the village. The wet air is not so much clean but fresh, a mystery of fomenting things both lovely and fearsome. But for now at least, I carry these gems of companionship in my heart. A pleasure, a warm joy.

…. and a poem from a friend….

Keep Reaching

The trick is to keep reaching

for the light you will never touch,

and to be nourished by the stretch

toward impossible things.

The trick is to bloom where you are,

not calling it a failure because

you wanted a different outcome.

Live each day devoted to awe, 

so that when a monarch lands 

on the tip of a coneflower, seeming 

to swell with that sudden infusion 

of sweetness, you don’t miss it. 

So that, while you watch, a pair 

of hard-won wings seems to open 

and close, and open again in you.~ James Crews

Wildfire Smoke.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

Are these days hot or chilly? All afternoon, working on my back porch, I put on and take off my sweatshirt, step into the sun to make phone calls, lean against the cool clapboards with my laptop. For days now, the air has been smoky with wildfires far away in the north. In the mornings, I wake coughing, wondering how people are breathing, so much nearer these fires.

August, and the raucous summer abruptly quiets. Walking in the woods with a friend, she notes a bird singing — wood or hermit thrush? — but all else is quiet save for our conversation. I’ve been here before, the pause between high summer and early autumn, when the swimming’s still good and the sunset lingers long after supper, but the mornings are filled with cool mist, and the shadows are not warm.

In past years, the faintest shadow of Long Winter has filled me with dread. Again, I will lose my tan, carry my laptop to the kitchen table, maybe go mad talking to my cats. Or not. Twice a day, I water the nasturtiums hanging in baskets on my back porch, listen to the neighbor boys biking. These days are yet long.

From Sunday poetry readings at the local arts center…

Wavering

What makes you think you’re so different? 
That was my weaker self hanging around outside the door. 
The voices over the telephone were accusing, too. 
“Must you always be you?” (They had the advantage, 
More bold without faces. They swirled a few ice cubes 
With a suggestive pause.) For a moment 
I took my heart out and held it in my hands. 
Then I put it back. This is how it is in a competitive world. 
But, I will not eat my own heart. I will not.

~ Ruth Stone

Keeping Company. Neighbors.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

A friend mentions her mother has an art opening that evening in the sprawling building that was once the village inn. We’ve just returned from a walk and stand in a field where, 25 years ago, she sold homemade pies and I sold maple syrup. We each held a nursing baby, in those years.

Her mother lives beside me, so about eight o’clock, the time I’m usually brushing teeth or walking around the house putting water glasses and cat bowls in the kitchen sink, I pull on a sweater (hello, Vermont July) and walk downtown. Monday, hardly anyone is out this evening, as the sunset does its peach-and-rose watercolor magic along the mountains.

I’m amazed, again, at my neighbor’s talent, her unique vision a mixture of O’Keeffe and Cézanne. I stand holding her hand and talking, this woman who lived plenty of lives before I met her. When I weed my front yard garden, she’ll sometimes lean out of her door and holler, “Hello, neighbor!” her hair in plastic curlers.

I walk the long way home through neighborhoods where the children have been called in for the night. Stray teenagers are out; no one else. There’s no glimmer of moon, but the stars are winking into their nightly places. I take an extra loop, and the darkness folds around me.

I’m in this odd place where people I hardly know touch my shoulders, rub my growing-back hair, as if to confirm that, yes, I’m alive. Or I’m looked at silently, uncertainly. The cancer’s made me rougher and gentler. Disinterested in cattiness, willing to visit a neighbor when my body aches to lie down.

At home, I linger on the house steps, the tree frogs serenading. These summer days are long, long, with some hours of work. More than anything, I’m determined to finish a draft of this third novel, determined to sell this book, too. Stubborn my mother would tell me. You’re so stubborn. By now it’s dark, the scattered village lights cupped in the town’s narrow valley, the Milky Way a silent celestial river. My mother despised my stubbornness, this trait that mirrored her. Or maybe I’m completely wrong about that.

I water the hanging plants, and yet I’m not willing to go in for the night, lie down and read, sleep. Last November, I was sitting on these steps in the darkness, the news of having cancer fresh and raw. A different neighbor appeared and sat with me. We talked about opioids and THC. She told me about her husband’s death. In the chilly November, we sat in our coats, a quiet between us, she keeping me company.

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, 
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”
― Czesław Miłosz

Blue Dress, Loving the Liminal.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

I stopped by a friend’s house where I’d not been in over a year. A friend who visited on my worst days, the first hours after chemo when, drugged and miserable, I could barely voice a request, Please, pick up my library books to get me through these days. I leave with my heart full as a flower bouquet, thinking of her mixture of domestic gardens and where the wild slips in…

Now, midsummer, the days as long as anyone could wish for. The cats and I are up with the sun spilling over the horizon, for kibble and coffee and more coffee. My daughters and I meet to do humdrum things, buy cat food and toothpaste. Walking on Vermont Land Trust property where we’d never been, we discover a children’s garden and wander through tunnels of grapevines to a toddler-sized table where we kneel, surrounded by walls of mammoth sunflowers.

It’s an ordinary day. We eat lunch, and my oldest buys chocolate cake, and we keep talking about the things that are unique to Family Us and the things that aren’t, like the news of Stephen Colbert’s imminence disappearance and the mad mad world.

In the sunlight, moving neither quickly nor slowly, we wander into a thrift store. As we wander around, I remember that this is a place where, last fall, I thought I would never return, that these ordinary days that seem so inconsequential would cease with my life.

I buy a summer dress for six one-dollar bills and nod a thank you to the young clerk who wishes me Enjoy!

I hug my daughters, hug them again, and in my own town again I pick up my library books and lie on the couch reading Jane Hirshfield’s words about liminality and poetry. Liminal, liminal, echoes in my mind. I close the book and walk my four-mile route along the river, the water murky and yet sparkling with sunlight shards as the current bends through curves and around rocks. I keep pondering liminal, that threshold between two realms, how I’d been in that thrift store numberless times, sometimes cheery, others frustrated with how the world wears you down, through parenting and worrying and hardship.

Today, I left that store with a folded piece of blue and white cotton, my body and soul electrified as if I had quaffed sunlight. Liminal. My daughter reminded me recently of that long April day that I broke, the day I cried all day long in the Dartmouth emergency room, and she kept going outside to call her sister. In a windowless room, I was desperate for spring sunlight. Hirshfield writes, “The threshold brings its riches, but its barrenness contributes as well.” Liminal.

“On Climbing the Sierra Mountains again after 31 years”

Range after range of mountains
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.

~ Gary Synder

At the edge of damage…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

A few days of radiant sunlight and steady breeze, a burnish on my cheeks: solid medicine. It’s spring.

In rapid succession now, the coltsfoot, the lungwort, Siberian squill, my mini daffodils bloom. Each day I remain out of the hospital feels like a victory, a day worth savoring. Afternoons, evenings, I lie in bed reading Dostoyevsky.

There’s this line from a Louise Glück poem I mull over as I walk around my budding forsythia, the Daphne I planted last summer that survived the winter. The line is: “Nothing can be forced to live.” In these lengthening days, I wonder if perhaps my attitude has been skewed for years, gritty-mouthed and wry, one foot behind me ready to flee, the other toes nestling into the garden. Mid-April, and green shoots and velvety petals thrust from the earth. The honeybees swarm. The groundhogs feast and dig. The children ride bikes.

We’re early enough in the season that I can yet pick out this patch of Chionodoxa, the lilac buds. My sandy Vermont hillside thrusts towards life. A poem my friend Jo sent my way, and I’ll send yours is below. Swan’s words about the crack in our world — how much these resonant with me. Now, in my days and nights after chemo, as I begin putting my life and soul back together, I remind myself (as my siblings remind me) to lean into my cracks, to embrace the holes and the whole of my life.

BOWL

BY HEATHER SWAN

for my mother

From the mud in her hands,
the bowl was born.
Opening like a flower
in an arch of petals,
then becoming a vessel
both empty and full.

Later, in the kiln
it was ravaged by fire,
its surface etched and vitrified,
searing the glaze into glass
as its body turned
to stone.

It is at the edge of damage
that beauty is honed.
And in Japan,
the potter tells me,
when a tea bowl
cracks in the fire,
that crack is filled
with gold.

Inauguration Eve. Cold. And me, the mad mutterer.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

On this Sunday inauguration eve, all day long, intermittently, as I go about the things I do, I’ve been thinking of a Mary Oliver poem. As I’ve written before, a friend has been sending me a poem each day that she reads aloud in her voice as clear as winter wind. Mid-January, Vermont, is the season both of winter settling in for the long haul and, conversely, as life often is, of lengthening days. We seek the merest brightening of the light as proof of spring’s promise. In her recording, my friend mentions seeing the division of seed packets in farm store, solid evidence of spring’s inevitability.

Later, just before twilight filters in, I walk out alone, tromping the short path through the woods and cemetery to the upper edge of the village. A few flakes of snow twirl. Otherwise, no one. My boots crunch over hard, packed snow. My mind is jammed with its usual monologue, when suddenly I realize my euphoria at walking along this wide road, flanked by white pines with broken branches, a single crow winging its way over the snowy Little League field. Yes, yes. I’ve forgotten my mittens, and my hands knotted in my coat pockets throb with cold, and yet I keep chortling like a mad woman, Yes and yes and yes.

Like any writer, I’m quite capable of running wildly with words, but as for the politics and national people, I’ll simply leave Mary Oliver’s words from her poem “Work, Sometimes.”

… What are we sure of?  Happiness isn’t a town on a map,
or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing.  Which is not likely to be the trifling around
with a poem.

Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.

You have had days like this, no doubt…. Ah, what a
moment!

As for myself, I swung the door open.  And there was
the wordless, singing world.  And I ran for my life.