#poetry

One Word.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, I kept remembering when we took our youngest camping beside a pond when she was two. She pointed to a purple flower growing in the water and learned to say pickerel. For days, she practiced that word, pick-er-el, saying it slowly and carefully, over and over.

Fourteen years later, she’s mastered that name and much more, working for days last spring at what appeared to me to be pages of math. She won’t remember one bit of that trip, but it’s in her, still.

In the evening, my daughters disappear to go running. I wash up dishes, then sit outside near the garden and where the wilderness edges up behind our world, with milkweed and raspberry brambles. As the dusk filters in, I read. The late summer crickets chirp their songs, and the world keeps moving on and on at what it does.

Sunflowers. Japanese beetles in the green beans. Tomatoes red on the vine. The rich scent of the promise of rain moving in.

Come

Let us dine on barley grain

On a journey nowhere“

— Bashō

So Much Water.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In the chilly August evening, my friend and I swim after dinner, while our families kick sand on the beach. We swim into the sunset, and I’m on the verge of shivering before we hit the ropes that mark off the swimming area.

When we return, the beach has been emptied of everyone except our families, and a little girl who wanders, eating from a bag of potato chips while her mother reads a tablet. The breeze raises goosebumps on my skin, and I pull clothes over my wet swimming suit.

I ride home with my youngest, the seat warmer toasty, the car’s windows filled with the sunset’s iridescent strawberry.

She wants me to trust her driving. Because I am me, I feel all around us the coldness of autumn creeping in, and how that cold whispers its own story. This evening, though, I lean back in her car, my bare feet shedding sand on her floor, and let her drive.

A half moon rises over the hillside, the pearl color of shell’s interior.

Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”

— Jack Kerouac
Greensboro, VT

On the Move.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Council Bluffs, Iowa, comes up randomly in conversation at work, and I remark idly that I’ve been there. A coworker asks why, and I answer vaguely that my family was passing through.

I haven’t driven around the country since I was in my twenties, and the country seems even larger and more unknown these days. In Vermont, again this summer, we see plenty of license plates from distant places — Tennessee, Missouri, Oregon — people on the move, for all kinds of reasons. There’s plenty of jobs, but nowhere to live.

Swimming at dusk, the water ripples before me, fracturing the raspberry sherbet sky into broken curves. August is the month when the peas are finished, and the rudbeckia blooms wildly.

Friday afternoon, I wash the screens and leave the windows open. The cicada sings, and my youngest teases me, You know what that sound means…. Our neighbor’s little boy pushes his toy mower across their grass, back and forth, serious about his work, in his own private world. Sunlight falls through the maple leaves fall above his head, the green fading toward gold, even this early in August.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.“

— Alan Watts

Footloose.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Nearing August, our Vermont summer is now tinged with strands of colder weather, the maples already beginning to redden in random patches. The sugar maple in Hardwick’s memorial park always tends to turn first.

The mornings are darker, too.

I knock into a friend in a parking lot who’s just returned from a drive out West. He relays that the interstates were filled with people traveling. Motel rooms were hard to come by. Strangers were unhelpful. Even the fish in the Rocky Mountain rivers where he had gone to fly fish weren’t biting he says mournfully. ‘I’m back to stay.’

In the dark mornings, before the sun rises, blood-red through smoke from distant wildfires, I read Sebastian Junger’s Freedom that I began reading in Burlington last weekend, while I waited for my daughters. I sat in the sunlight, remembering when I bought a William Vollman novel two decades ago, and read it in a tiny Toyota we had been given, while nursing my newborn.

At the heart of most stable governments is a willingness to share power with people you disagree with — and maybe even hate…. Values like fairness and human dignity [are] going to determine at least some of the rules of the game.”

— Sebastian Junger

Moon.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

On her way out last night, my daughter calls back into the house, Come see the moon!

A full moon rises behind our barn — the July Buck Moon. The night is so luminescent I can easily see the lilies along the barn.

I suppose the moon reflects the faraway sun, but the moonlight glows so vibrantly, like living molten gold, that the moon this night seems particularly alive, so close I imagine reaching out and dipping my hands into the round bucket of its beauty.

I know, theoretically, our house on this planet is spinning, too, but from our patch of grass and stone walkway and garden and house, it appears the lovely moon will rise and sail over our house and us sleeping in our bedrooms all night along. A magical thought — one I take comfort from.

“And The Moon and the Stars and the World”

Long walks at night– 
that’s what good for the soul: 
peeking into windows 
watching tired housewives

— Charles Bukowski

Burton Island, Vermont

Family.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My friend and I spent many hours drinking coffee and watching our (then) little kids play at the edge of Caspian Lake, on colder summer days moving our coffee to the front seat of the car while my daughter’s hair blew over her eyes and lips in the wind. Those little kids are all grown up now, busily figuring out their own lives.

This Saturday, while we’re swimming, my daughters have dressed in heels and dresses and gone to a wedding. Late that night, after a long drive, they return with stories not about the dress or the Inn or the cake, but with stories of people and families and whose lives have gone awry and who is kind. An aunt and uncle of the bride have traded in family participation for a cult. Another family member is wandering out west, immersed in her own story, having cut herself free from any family obligation.

In the midst of this are the young adults, all working hard, scrambling in the severe shortage of housing in Vermont, trading advice about colleges and education. Brushing our teeth, we laugh and laugh. My daughters are no longer young in the way of using sand toys at the beach, but very young at heart, ready to make the world new in their own lives and hearts.

Family, we agree, using this word as both a noun and a verb.

Midsummer. Rain. Snails in the cabbage. Blooming calendula. I wouldn’t trade these obligations for the world.

“I am so far from being a pessimist…on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.” 

― Eugene O’Neill