poem

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.”

The truth is erasure.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Saturday morning, I chip at my day’s list, persistent: my thousand creative words, email that shouldn’t linger, the house chores of wood and compost. On the nearby trails, I ski and later drink coffee with my beloveds, and we ponder construction that will tie up this town, Hardwick, until the sundress-wearing season. At home again, I finish the 2025 taxes, stow things in boxes, preparing for a carpenter who will remove a kitchen wall and put a window in my kitchen. This plan I hatched while I was marooned in my house for months, struggling through chemo. Now, this winter, I wondered, Am I mad? Will I still proceed? But opening the heart of my house to the view of the village seems a hopeful act, a kind of creative resistance against dismal five-year survival statistics, an act of beauty in contrast to the darkening world.

I abruptly need the sky and the muddy earth beneath my boots. I consider phoning this friend or that friend to walk with me, but I doubt anyone will jump at the sudden request. On this ridgeline road, I see a friend who quickens my blood. We walk and talk for bit about the things that nourish my winter-worn soul: about the unexpected in our lives, about writing and doubt, an April event of poetry and art and food. About what Bashō called “the journey itself is home.”

She heads home, and I keep on along the maples. All winter I’ve walked here. One frigid January, I’d gone too far and considered flagging a stranger in a car for a ride, but I didn’t. I kept on, as we all do. An eagle spreads its wings over a hayfield then disappears over a treeline. Blackbirds sing. A skunk waddles along the road. The snowbanks are above my head. The creature and I consider each other. Then, on our respective sides of the road, we each ease along. When I look back, the skunk is hurrying along, too.

Another spring. So many years I’ve lived through a New England winter, so many springs, and yet each March arrives as a surprise, a fresh reckoning. The wind smells of the opening earth. Twilight will soon be nestling in, and I’ll be home again, feeding my cats and the woodstove, eating a blood orange. A friend plans to visit, and we’ll keep each other company. Better to think of the days without names or numbers. Wiser to place these with a friend’s name, with skunk, puddle, blood moon.

You ask the sea, what can you promise me
and it speaks the truth; it says erasure.

… Nothing can be forced to live.
The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,
a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.
It says forget, you forget.
It says begin again, you begin again. ~ Louise Glück

The Goddamn Gray, the Brilliance of Language.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

A year ago, my daughter was driving me to the local ER, yet again, under the frigid winter sky. Wordless, I leaned my head against the side window of her Subaru, staring at the faraway pricks of stars vanishing and reappearing among the clouds. In the darkness, I fixated on one thought—the white hospital bed, the clear liquid drugs that would make the pain cease—and held to that, my lifeline. Cancer-and-chemo, in its infinite complexity, is a monotone landscape. In all those months, my existence was the blackness of pain, the temporary light of relief-from-pain, the crimson drug injected into my veins. Occasionally, a cardinal at a feeder, blood oranges, and then I couldn’t eat those, either, and I remained alive on Saltines and water.

I keep thinking of those below zero nights as I drive this night to the opposite end of town. There, with a friend in a place where I’ve never been, we eat drunken noodles and green curry, and then drive again through the darkness and the drifting snow that’s no threat, simply prettiness. At the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, we settle into the dining hall with the residents. We’re greeted warmly, and the room is scented with the lingering remains of a savory dinner, of coffee and wine and the fragrance of flowers likely from the tables freshly scrubbed. This is a dear place, where I’ve been lucky to stay and work hard, meet friends and share stories about creativity, its hardness and joy.

Rigoberto González reads magnificently, his words, reminding me of when I was a teenager reading James Joyce for the first time, thinking yes, yes, this is what writing can do, push us into a place where we glimpse the world for a moment in all its shimmering and confounding complexity, its immense sorrow, utter fun, or the way a hand plucks a pebble from a river and holds it dripping and glistening to the sunlight.

At home, I stand in the darkness that is sodden with cold, a forerunner of the mighty freeze rushing this way. The crescent moon pushes against the clouds. In those underworld months, the goddamn gray occasionally scattershot with goldfinches exploding from bare branches, my fate might easily have veered another path. A storm and brutal cold loom over this nation submerged beneath political nefariousness.

This terrible disease, this exacting instructor, taught me brutal lessons. Among these, savor these draughts of warmth, recognize heart. Know this value. Do not disparage.

“Every person with a body should be given a guide to dying as soon as they are born.”
― Anne Boyer

Brief Thaw.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the January thaw, a wind — balmy for winter — curls around my house, and all night long the chimes hung on the back porch jangle their melody. The chimes are the song of this house, in all the seasons of this northern climate.

Despite the thaw, the hours of these days are yet short. I wake ages before light bleeds over the horizon, my cats ready for breakfast, the woodstove in need of feeding, myself hungry for hot coffee and work. I gather what I can of my energy and cup this in my hands, gauging how the day lies ahead. Not so long ago, I could work, and work, and work. Offer me twenty dollars for a quick edit, and I’d jump. Post-cancer, post-chemo, not so.

Walking downtown, I pass the coffee shop. Two friends at a window table wave at me to come in, come in. Inside, I shrug off my coat that’s in need of washing and set my backpack on the floor. We talk books and woodpile status, politics and the amnesia of American consciousness. Above the coffee shop is the yoga studio with the gleaming maple floors, where I stand at the window, watching traffic ebb into the diner parking lot. The river bends through the village here, heads westward beneath the cover of ice towards Lake Champlain, whose waters flow north. In the alley between this brick building and the next, the wind cuts upward. Snow drifts towards the sky.

There are days when I think that everything I know is upended. That snow has no mind for gravity.

Before dawn, I carry out ashes and stand in the dark, icicles dripping, cold breath from the snow grabbing my wrists. In the thaw, the earth smells of rotting compost, woodsmoke from my house and my neighbors’, the assured promise of spring, yet far in the offing.

… I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder, not constantly, but often enough to leave a mark upon all my life’s decisions and actions. And it does not matter whether this death comes next week or thirty years from now, this consciousness gives my life another breadth… — Andre Lorde

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