poems

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.

Snow geese and cancer and macaroni and cheese.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 16 Comments

My friend walks into my kitchen. The windows are shrouded in the remains of last night’s darkness. She bends down and looks at my face, reminding me of those enervating conversations in ERs with doctors. After a careful moment, she pronounces, You look good. My house is warm; her sentence warms me more.

In the St. Johnsbury hospital, she drops me at the laboratory door. A receptionist sends me down the hall, in search of elevators. A woman in the waiting room follows rickety me in my winter boots, and repeats the directions. I wander down halls empty of people, interspersed with lit Christmas trees in what seem to me random corners and notches. Someone calls my name. I turn and look, and of course this is my friend, who for a fleeting moment I don’t recognize in her bundled coat, surgical mask.

Not far from the Canadian border, St.Johnsbury has a faded charm from its former heyday of logging and Fairbanks scales. This December morning, the day sputters, promising no sunlight, maybe a few rosy strands in the opening daybreak. In my strange fog, I wonder if the light mirrors Siberia. My blood is drawn and spun. Waiting for the verdict, I stare out the window, the layers of coal and washed-thin blue and last night’s pale snow. Beside me, a man introduces himself says he owns a garage and towing business. I pull down my mask and offer my name. My voice is so muted he can hardly hear me, but I ask him to tell me about his plowing so far this winter. While we wait, he obliges me. My hands, he says, will never be clean enough for hospitals.

Siberia, I think, Siberia, as the garage owner pinpoints roads. The daylight notches up a bit. Save for my friend, waiting elsewhere, I know no one here, but this winter landscape of snow and pale mountain, the livelihood of working with hands and backs and people, is familiar to me as my thumb knuckles, the loneliness of lingering over the morning’s last cup of cooling black coffee, pondering some decision that’s wormed itself in the day.

So disease, cancer, that forbidding word, burrows in. The disease is me; the blood is mine; the nurse explains numbers, says hematocrit, hemoglobin. Less than a handful of weeks into this journey, I know my blood courses with immutable facts, ragingly powerful chemistry. The blessing to leave is laid upon me.

Home again from distant Siberia — is it midmorning? afternoon’s mire? — my friend sweeps ashes from my wood stove and nourishes gleaming coals with birchbark and splinters, odd pieces of end wood. This day unfurls, somber and patient, settling into winter’s long haul. I offer a piece of my daughter’s gingerbread. For hours now, we’ve talked about migrating snow geese and cancer and macaroni and cheese. She asks if I would take her on a nighttime walk — I envision the throb of spring peepers, the redolent rotting slop of thawing earth — indeed, a pleasure I might give back, to one of my shepherds holding me steady as I wobble down my back steps.

This precise moment… Now.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

My daughter and I drink coffee at the kitchen table and talk about the election. Sun pours in through the glass doors. A cat lies on the table between us, purring, utterly blissful.

At 19, it’s her first presidential ballot. At 19, I was a different kind of young woman, holed up in a far-off-the-path cabin with a boyfriend, determined to forge my future in “the smithy of my soul….” My daughter’s generation was shaped in the smithy of the pandemic. Last week, I tore off the New Yorker cover and clipped the illustration of Harris to our kitchen calendar, a white star gleaming on her earlobe. My daughter and I wonder, if Harris, then what? If not, then what? There’s no answers, yet, to any of this, the future yet to be revealed. We fry eggs, butter toast, brew more coffee.

Later, in the night, I’m out in my fat wool sweater and Danskos, holding a cup of hot honey tea, looking for the northern lights. The stars are crystalline, swirled through with white. The wind soughs through the white pines in the ravine behind my house, and a creamy half-moon, like a luscious unworldly melon slice — so tantalizing I’d like to hold it with both hands — hangs over my house.

I’m at the edge of my garden, that familiar place where, if I smoked cigarettes or drank scotch, I’d linger, contemplating the sunflower stalks and the village lights below. The night pretties up the village, wraps it up, so I can see how small this place really is. In the night, my heart opens toward the village; in the daylight, not so much.

The light from my house illuminates stray leaves sailing through the darkness, the great shift of autumn. Like so many of my friends, I’m at that place in life, kids growing and grown, where creative possibilities unfurl. I’m doing the things I’ve done nearly all my life: drinking tea, staring up at the wonder of the night firmament, contemplating which way I’ll jump. In the meantime, I’ve been housekeeping: edge away from that negative snarl, lean into what and who I know is true, the wind and the stars, the moving moon, this swallow of tea, this precise moment. Now.

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”

— Alan Watts