poem

“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.

The WHAT IS.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My brother and I break off the rail trail and hike up a spur trail. I haven’t been here before, but I once lived on the side of the moutanin where we now head. July, neither hot nor cold, we’re in shorts and t-shirts, walking and talking, laughing about things only siblings seem to hold. It’s just us and the hermit thrush and mosquitoes. We’ve left phones and work behind; maybe it’s 1978 again.

A few hours later, we descend steeply into the other end of town, where Cooper Brook runs by the liquor store, Dollar General, a snack shack. Through goldenrod, we walk along the sandy former railroad bed. A dense forest shelters around and turns the trail to muddy ruts, stones washed slick with recent rain. Frogs leap from puddles. I step around a wide toad.

My brother’s visited many times, most with me, some alone in my house while I was in the hospital. In the evening, we pick up the tour again, walking through the brushy path to the cemetery that seems to delight only me. Ticks! Blackberry brambles! It’s just a short stretch, and I strangely revel in this tangled passage, as if a portal from home to village, sweetened with black raspberries. We stop and visit a new neighbor, then trek again downtown, to the river where workers have been re-armouring the granite walls all summer, pouring footings for a suspension bridge.

I point out the shop where friends feed feral cats—one sleek creature sitting in the driveway, watching—and the house that burned and a woman died. My map of the town unspools: the apartments with the overdoses, the former inn where, in a garret room, I once met a therapist in a rainstorm whose dogs lay on the floor and I begged her to salvage my life from a chaotically breaking marriage. As I stared out the window at the rain crashing on the porch roof below, I realized whatever salvaging was going to be done had to be done by myself. Downstairs was a now closed-up bakery where I bought donuts with my youngest daughter. The superintendent’s office where I attended a hundred school board meetings. The river’s edge, where I gathered white pebbles with my daughters and created a rock garden.

Countless treks around this little town. Mid-July, neither hot nor cold, the wind still, the river low. I’ve seen the town flood, brutal cold descend. Atlas I’m creating of manifold layers.

…. and a thank you to David Goodman of VTDigger for this podcast with the writer Catherine Tudish.

“Prayer” by Galway Kinnell

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Dumpster Raiding, Poetry, Independence Day.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Ocean Vuong reads at a nearby arts center that is built in a farm field with a stage modeled on the Globe Theater. My friend and I cruise in, nearly late, and the parking lot is full. Hundreds of people have arrived. On this holiday weekend, I’ve swam and eaten ice cream, stepped inadvertently from friend to friend, like the twilight walk that ended in darkness on a trail, two small women talking, talking, fireworks booming in the blackness around us.

Vuong reads mesmerizingly, like a dream. He begins with remarking that humanity began in poetry and war, and how this will shake out after the Anthropocene is yet of course to be determined. By the reading’s end, I wipe tears from eyes. Immensely talented, utterly humble, Vuong offered homage to craft of storytelling—its essential role in all human life—and to the women who raised him. Four Vietnamese women in hardscrabble Massachusetts wrested free from their bad men and raised seven sons. None of these women were writers, but they were all oral storytellers who told their stories to salvage their dignity from the harms of the men. The repair was for their sons—and themselves.

And the poetry and war where Vuong began? By the hour’s end, his words stream through me, like that Buddhist retreat I attended last summer, my body still bitten by cancer to more bones than flesh. In those days, for fleeting moments I could envision my own near death, that this body I’ve used so hard will go down into soil and stone, that tendrils of roots and melting snow will erase me from this world of language and teeming desire, and yet I will have never gone anywhere at all.

Likewise, listening, I realize the poet carried all of us, not one more than another, along his mellifluous words, that the human history of this country, America, is inextricably bound in the polarity of war and poetry, a profound rushing flood of passing time and undefinable generations.

Later, my dear friend headed home to her dog and her life, I wandered along the back end of the village where a dumpster lies overturned. From the rubble, I extricated a glossy Dorothea Lange photo, the famous portrait of a mother and children. I rolled it up and tucked it beneath my arm. For you, I write for you, because you are me.

NOTHING

We are shoveling snow, this man and I, our backs coming closer
along the drive. It’s so quiet I can hear every flake on my coat. I
used to cry in a genre no one read. What a joke, they said, on fire.
There’s no money in it, son, they shouted, smoke leaking from
their mouths. But ghosts say funny things when they’re family.
This man and I, we take the weight of what will vanish anyway
and move it aside, making room. There is so much room in a
person there should be more of us in here. I wave to you, traveler,
inches away but never visible from where I am. Are you warm
where you are? Are you you where you are? Something will come
of this. In one of the rooms in the house the man and I share, a
loaf of rye is rising out of itself, growing lighter as it takes up more
of the world. In humans, we call this Aging. In bread, we call
it Progress. We’re in our thirties now and I rolled the dough just an
hour ago, pushing my glasses up my nose with my flour-dusted
palm as I read, reread, the hand-scrawled recipe given me by the
man’s grandmother, the one who, fleeing Stalin, bought a ticket
from Vilnius to Dresden without thinking it would stop, it so
happened, in Auschwitz (it was a town after all), where she and
her brother were asked to get off by soldiers who whispered, keep
moving, keep moving like sons leading their mothers through
wheat fields in the night. How she passed through huddled coats,
how some were herded down barb-wired lanes. The smoke from
our mouths rising as the man and I bend and lift, in silence, the
morning clear as one inside a snow globe. For how can we know,
with a house full of bread, that it’s hunger, not people, that
survives? The man pours a bag of salt over the pavement. But
from where I’m standing it looks like light is spilling out of him,
like the ray of dusty sun that found his grandmother’s hands as
she got back on the train, her brother at her side, smoke from the
engine blown across the faces outside blurring into pine forests,
warped pastures, empty houses with full rooms. The man
clutches his stomach as if shot, and the light floods out of him, I
mean you—because something must come of this. Poetry makes
nothing happen, someone who is dead now said after a friend’s
death. When the guard asked your grandmother if she was
Jewish, she shook her head, half-lying, then took from her bag a
roll, baked the night before, tucked it in the guard’s chest pocket.
She didn’t look back as the train carried her, newly seventeen,
toward where I now stand, on a Sunday in Florence,
Massachusetts, squinting at her faded words: sift flour, then beat
eggs until “happy-yellow.” The train will reach Dresden days before
the sky is filled with firebombers. More smoke. A bullet in her
brother under rubble, his name everywhere outside her like the
snow falling on your face forty years later, on December 2, 1984,
while your mother carries you, alive only three hours, the few
steps to the mini-van where your grandmother, nearly sixty now,
crowns your head with her brother’s name. Peter! she says, Peter!
Peter! as if the dead could be called back from rubble into new,
stunned bones. The snow has started up again, whitening the
path as though nothing happened. Oh, to live like a bullet, to
touch people with such purpose. To be born going one way,
toward everything alive. To walk into the world you never asked
for but then choose the room where your hunger ends—which
part of war do we owe such knowledge? It’s warm in this house
where we will die, you and I. Let the stanza be one room, then.
Let it be big enough for everyone, even the ghosts rising now
from this bread we tear open to see what we’ve made of each
other. I know, we’ve been growing further apart, unhappy but
half full. That clearing snow and baking bread will not save us. I
know, too, as I reach across the table to brush the leftover ice
from your beard, that it’s already water. It’s nothing you say,
laughing for the first time in weeks. It’s really nothing. And I believe
you. I shouldn’t, but I do.

~ Ocean Vuong

June’s Snow.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

We eat on the back deck of a little restaurant in Plainfield, Vermont, home of the former Goddard College, its campus now morphing towards its next phase. In Plainfield, there’s hand-lettered LOVE signs everywhere, a sense that people are doing interesting things like writing novels in verse in treehouses, and folks say hi when we pass on the sidewalks, as if they know us. And maybe they do. Tiny Vermont.

Rain sprinkles around the table’s umbrella. Overhead, leaning back, I spy a puzzle piece of blue sky, a horn of the half moon.

Solstice, the longest day of the year, fragrant with roses, a serenade of toad songs. Afterwards, we walk along the river, then uphill, where the floods in the past few years cut the hillside, rammed silt and rock into houses that remain, people-less, doubtlessly waiting for FEMA money that may or may not arrive, an excavator, another breaking. We turn and wander through higher ground, where gardens flourish green and pink. Hammocks are strung for summer reading in porches.

June’s ineffable loveliness.

In the long twilight I drive home, my tires splashing through puddles where rain has fallen hard and missed us. Around Woodbury Lake, the mist layers among the emerald hills, the sky’s deepening blue, sunset gold. Beloved Vermont, relishing her own beauty. I don’t pause, the radio off, only me and my own stray thoughts. I drive north on this road where I’ve traveled for so many years, in so many kinds of weather, passing the place of the terrible recent accident, the unspeakable tragedy, and then I’m in little Woodbury village again. Wetlands and church and school and post office. Fog trails around me.

I’m not at all a churchgoing woman, but the phrase yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death clangs through me, resonates in my soul and body like a bell’s clapper. The dearness of this life, so easily torn.

At home, in the thin wisps of light, I wander through my garden, the campion white, the mock orange blossoms June’s snow. Through my neighbors’ windows, laughter spills.

“Peonies at Dusk,” Jane Kenyon

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

Re-teaching loveliness.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Photo above is evidence of my loose approach to living with cats, an approach my visitors either embrace or wonder, what’s up with the cats on the counters? Brush stroke by rag wipe, I proceed with my kitchen project. I am a woman who craves order. Keeping my kitchen in cardboard boxes is not my SPARK JOY go-to; nonetheless, I persevere.

With added windows, I am relearning the light in my kitchen. Sure as anything, the metaphor of this project does not elude me. A year ago, a friend visited me in my Dartmouth room, bringing knitting and butterscotch pudding. Before she left, she walked me around the hall, 150′. We walked that loop twice? Through the window, the green and rain filled the day.

A year later, novel writing and paintbrush washing, property taxes and weeding, the Monday morning plan for a week’s work. The metaphor of this has not escaped me. In the co-op, reaching for broccoli, a long-ago acquaintance startles when he sees me.

I’d heard you were dead, he says.

Not yet, I laugh. Squeaked through, for now.

A year ago, I’d envisioned a kind of ease for myself; surviving lymphoma had made me invincible to misery in certain ways—a disinterest in petty bullshit, a newfound ability to let the little bickering struggles that seem to plague our time, or maybe simply our human nature, fall with the dust and debris on the kitchen floor. But what rose, instead, with sharpened teeth, were those existential questions: how does meaning structure my life? Who’s with me? Where to tap happiness, that old true word?

Walking home, I cough and touch the lymph nodes in my neck. Has that mighty disease returned? I’m at the kids’ ballfield, where the turkey vulture roost in the surrounding woods. Evening, the thrush sing. Holding these two things — the thrush’s melody, the circling vultures — I head home. Where the cats wait for me on the kitchen counter.

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;   

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness… ~ Galway Kinnell

Gravy

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

In the town where I work, the summer folks haven’t yet returned. By chance, on a rural road around the lake, I meet a builder. “Hey!” he calls to me, and I can hear the surprise in his voice. You’re alive? I am, indeed, yes.

Around us, a sugar snow melts. Sunlight falls through the trees that are a month out, at least, from this year’s first nubs of leaves. Behind him, the silent snow-covered lake. We kick around, as Vermonters do, what it’s like to live in our Green Mountain state right now, how hot passions run, how immediately aid is given to a neighbor in need. What it’s like to live in the crumbling of the American Empire, a madman at the helm. In a copse of cedars, blackbirds chorus.

Precisely one year ago, I could not walk outside my house alone. Ravaged by cancer and chemo and hunger, I was so weak I trembled, on the verge of falling. A rattle of bones, scraps of flesh.

On this clearing day, on my way home, I stop by the co-op and buy two pears. I lay these on the seat of my car and dart across Main Street to the post office. Without realizing it, I’m running. As I leap onto the sidewalk, I marvel at the pleasure of movement, the sun in my short hair, my cheeks wind-burnt from a recent long walk along a muddy backroad. I took the time to stand before a tree of chittering goldfinches.

All this week I’ve been reading Robert Frost, perhaps my mother’s favorite poet. A poet who wrote of stone walls and apple picking and the ineffable darkness of human life. But here’s a poem to celebrate today, this day, no matter where or who you are, by Ray Carver who knew the great symphony of life, too.

Gravy

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy.
Gravy these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”