poetry

“… a definition of love…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

All afternoon, I work on my back deck. Hummingbirds dart at the hanging nasturtiums, rain sprinkling down around the porch roof. In the late afternoon, I swop jeans for shorts, tie on my shoes, and head out for a run. I run for maybe a mile, no more, then walk in circles, my hands on my hips. The mid-August world is a crazy abundance, hydrangeas and Queen Anne’s Lace reveling in their showiness.

I had thought I would never run again, that kind of energy and strength irremediably sapped by disease and treatment. Yet, this afternoon, I determine, Well, what you do know… Ahead lies a long evening of a Selectboard meeting in a particularly Vermont-vein: the nuts-and-bolts of the town’s daily business of salt and sheriff contracts, what to do about wastewater, and the passion projects of conserving land and eliminating streetlights. A microcosm of the country in a former schoolroom where everyone is on a first-name basis. Like it or not.

Long past nightfall, I’m home again, lying on the couch and reading Louise Erdrich, cats between my knees, the windows open and the crickets sizzling. Above, photo of myself with beloved daughters. After chemo, my hair returned in ringlets, the straight hair of my childhood replaced by exuberant happiness.

“Green Apples” by Ruth Stone

In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
To the back porch
And slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
Telling me something:
Saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
And rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like a definition of love,
Saying, this is the moment,
Here, now.

“… the now of us…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The incomparable Mary Elder Jacobsen reads her poetry at Elmore State Park. A sultry August morning, I come alone, friends off doing one summer thing or another. Mary reads in the beach house with the doors and windows open, a breeze carrying in the lake’s lapping and children’s laughter.

Afterwards, because I’m there, I hike the mountain. My family and I have hiked this mountain many times, but I haven’t been here in a few years. Last summer, I was walking—short stretches at first, then longer—gaining strength from the trifecta of cancer and chemo and surgery, gaining strength week by week. This summer, I’ve pulled out my hiking boots, pushing. How far will my strength return?

The rocky outcropping is familiar, a bit more brushy, but the cement footings of a vanished cabin are as I remember, with purple asters and wild roses. A sweltering, sweaty day that recalls my New Hampshire childhood, the countless hikes with my dad. A couple arrives, and we talk about the lake below, the view of the forest and hayfield landscape. We share apples, handfuls of crackers, stories.

The story I don’t share is the January evening I parked at the lake’s edge and walked out on the ice beneath the piercing stars. I was on my way from a late meeting to pick up my daughter at a friend’s house, and I’d allotted myself exactly ten minutes. The cold came at me like arrows. Across the lake, the ice cracked like a shot in the fierce temperature. And the constellations? Ancient and present and promising a future…. Now, years later, in moist August scented with those roses…. This day bears no thinking of time. August, in her tumbling abundance.

That January night, my daughter was waiting for me, wanting home. We’d been gone for hours and hours, since early morning, and the wood stove had gone cold, our house inhospitable. Rushing — I was always rushing in those days — I kindled the fire, boiled boxed macaroni and cheese, carried in more wood. We ate in front of the crackling wood stove, sharing our days. All the seasons of a life. Now, this August afternoon, damselflies flicker.

Hours later, I swim in my favorite pond. A friend and I swap stories and books, crackers, tomatoes, cheese. A stranger swims, too, and the stories widen. In a pouring rainstorm, I drive home, then stand under my covered porch and lean against my dear house, drenched from swimming and rain. The earth drinks deeply.

Because, whatever Science says about some equal future moon, 
I know the rare particulars of this vast and intimate brilliance— 
the now of us—won’t ever, in our lifetime, come my way again. ~ Mary Elder Jacobsen

Gold and Green: August

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

I’m yet on my homemade, hand-crafted Call It Madness Mad Book tour…. reading at 6 p.m. tonight at the exquisite St. Johnsbury Athanaeum. Book discussion Friday, at the Craftsbury Public Library, 5 p.m.

In between readings and work, family and chores…. summer spins on. An evening downpour yesterday drenches my swimming plans. Instead, I walk downtown and drop postcards in the mailbox, then keep on walking. The rain lessens. With my hood off, the drizzle curls these new-found ringlets, unexpected gift courtesy of chemo. The evening shines emerald.

At the river, I scramble down the bank, kick off my sandals, and wander among the water-smoothed stones and boulders. Not far from me, traffic rumbles along route 15. The river talks, too, this ancient place, waters carrying their chorus to the sea….

Summer night—
even the stars
are whispering — Issa

“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.

“The present pushes back the life of regret.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Lucky, lucky to reading in such charming backroads Vermont places. Lucky to be driving with a companion who gets me there via google maps and keeps me company on the drive. I’ll read at The Norwich Bookstore tonight, that familiar trek down I-91, but this time turning at Exit 13, not east towards Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center but east towards the literary world. With deep satisfaction. (Book signing Saturday, July 18, at Phoenix Books in Burlington, 1-3pm)

A friend stops by and cautions me that thunderstorms and hail, maybe fire and brimstone are expected tonight. I laugh because, well, why not. There’s those cliches about life’s a journey and so on, reductive things for a bumper sticker or card, with of course a soul of truth. Early evening, I read under the butternut tree, sparrows chittering, a woodchuck grazing beneath the lilac hedge. I’ve been here before: such a gorgeous wild sprawling summer, and already the days are dampening at each end, just the merest. The neighbors drive up, cheery and sweaty from baseball, and agree yes, more sun, more summer. The woodchuck looks up, untroubled, and munches on. I think, I could get a dog. Or not.

A mosquito bites my big toe. Swifts dart above my head.

The present pushes back the life of regret.
It draws forward the life of desire. Soon memory
will have started sticking itself all over us.
We were fashioned from clay in a hurry,
poor throwing may mean it didn’t matter
to the makers if their pots cracked. — Galway Kinnell