poetry

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

Holy Nightsky.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

10 degrees on a starry night, my daughter phones me while I’m cramming more wood in the stove. She’s on a dark-soaked back road, the northern lights resplendent, and urges me to go in search. Up Bridgeman Hill, she tells me, with the ridgeline view.

So, bundled in coat and hat, I drive through the little village and up the hill where the town lights cannot touch. In my headlights, wind scatters snow gathered from the wide hayfields, winter dormant. I pull over at the hill’s crest where two farms join. I get out of my car and walk down the road. The limitless sky gleams ruby and emerald, an immense shaft of white light luminescent. In the east, the black spreads profoundly, the stars so radiant I imagine I could reach out and grasp these gems.

John Donne wrote that illness is a “holy room.” My oncologist taught me that we are all the ailing; if not now, to come. Mortality’s cut makes zero discrimination. A cancer diagnosis gained me admission to inner chambers. Unwanted—let me reiterate again, I did not request admission. But I hung up my coat in the anteroom and set my hiking boots against the wall, and I walked barefoot and thirsty into the nexus, me and that fiercely multiplying lymphoma. The lymphoma and me — one of us was not going to survive this go-round.

In the night’s darkness, the rushing wind tore at my cheeks and hurled ice in my eyes. In the distance, a cow barn glowed with light, a scatter of houses in the valley. Around me, that immense and mysterious beauty over small human beings, at whatever mundane chore or decency or devilment we conjure, be it the evening milking or washing supper dishes or plotting a wrong against another.

The sharp-clawed cold shoves me back towards my car, back towards the village and my hot woodstove, my little house in the great holy room of this planet, this universe, this precise moment.

“It seemed like I was doing something ludicrous, trying to build a permanent work of literature out of broken little whimpering bits about the most ephemeral experiences when I was still mostly broken and half-ephemeral myself.”
― 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

Another Plot Point.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A friend inquires if my summer’s adrenaline, the post-chemo and post-surgery and cancer-remission wave of energy has waned, and, indeed, that has, the winter and cold and what’s called fatigue but is actually a lifeless bleak plain setting up quarters in my household.

Winter is a reckoning time. In a strange kind of way I begin to see the pieces of my life jostle into a pattern — childhood and college years and those years in my twenties when I ran back and forth across the country and then to northern Vermont, how I built a marriage and house, the young mothering years of children and friends, how we taught ourselves to sugar and run a business and I taught myself to write. Then I broke that life apart and took the children, created a new life, kept writing books, learned to view the world askance to keep danger from our door. Danger slunk in anyway. The world, indeed, is cause and effect, not a linear straight-shot but a dense sphere. Surely the human story is the same for you and me, with its endlessly profound and terrible and awesome variations.

This morning, the harsh cold has relented, just the slightest, snow sifting down, the blue dawn pushing away the night’s darkness.

I’m encouraged to seek “protective factors” which I glean as my daughters’ merriment, a purring cat on my chest as a I read by the woodstove, a walk with a friend on a snowy road. My heart longs for the season of those #10 Pond swims, with friends or without, the sun hot on my bare knees. Spectator to the loon world. Not iced coffee but hot coffee. Now, these days of small light. In a considered burst of optimism, I mail a carpenter a check in a card with snowy evergreens and seal our agreement. Come when the weather splits and put two more windows in my house. Open the view of the valley and the village. Another plot point.

What would people look like

if we could see them as they are,

soaked in honey, stung and swollen,

reckless, pinned against time? — Ellen Bass

To Know the Dark.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

This is the season of scant light, the day’s heart sooty at best.

Oh, the darkness, keeper of so many secrets. My garden’s soil where rough-edged chard and calendula seeds germinate, where tree roots clench and foxes den. In the summer, the night sounds sing of lust and procreation, hunger and scavenging. The night is the realm of star and moonlight, of the mysteries of creation and romance. And more—in all those hospital nights I endured this past winter, I often woke drenched in nightmares, disoriented. Gasping, I whispered that I was still here, still part of this world. A hospital at night is a ship full of humans, listing its way through uncharted territory.

This morning, crossing over gradually into the days of longer light, into this winter that has barely begun to breathe its life, I carry my glowing ash bucket outside and stand in the cold. Below me, the village lights sprinkle through the valley. My neighbors, early risers, too, have not yet snapped on their kitchen lamp. The wind stirs, and I shiver, barefoot in my Danskos, my hearth divided between stove and bucket, inside and outside, a small thing to consider. I keep standing, keep shivering, my blood running hot.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings. ~ Wendell Berry (of course)

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