poetry

Heart Runneth Over…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The Gihon River runs through the Vermont Studio Center campus, turning as a river does just out my studio window. All day long, the mallards do their duck thing, swimming up and downstream. In the wild honeysuckle’s tiny bits of green leaves, cardinals perch.

In this week I’ve spent at the Vermont Studio Center, I’ve leaned with a ferocity and joy into writing. A week to write, unfettered by the everydayness of commerce and cooking, of checking the car oil, adhering to those endless lists of can the house insurance get a lower premium, and am I ever going to paint the back side of my house? A thousand things comprise a life — some stupidly trivial like repairing a kitchen cabinet knob, some sacredly profound, like mourning a parent’s passing. 

Does writing, does sculpture, printmaking, poetry, make the world a finer place? The jury’s out perhaps, but art certainly unites the finer parts of who we are as humans, and makes this life more bearable.

Thank you again for reading.

The Bardo.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

A few years ago, I bought a stick of a forsythia plant. The plant had withered in a nursery which hadn’t cared much for this plant, one of the three or four remaining perennials at the season’s end. For years, I had wanted to plant a forsythia with its cheery early-spring blooms, but I stood there and considered. The plant was about ten dollars. I eventually opened my wallet and took the admittedly meager risk.

The plant thrived. A few years later, I sold that house, dug up the forsythia, and carried the pot in the back of a friend’s pickup to my new house. The plant grew but never thrived, more stick and leaf than bloom.

This year, however, seven years into our life here, the blooms are abundant. I am not a Buddhist, not trained or schooled in any formal education at all, but here’s a thing. For a period of time after each of my daughters was born, I lived in a rarefied space, not of the common everyday world, but exposed and tender, as if the sky had opened up. I had labored to carry a six-pound baby into this mortal world. I had a foot in this world, and a foot still lingering in a gauzy undefined realm. But each day of nursing and crying, of meals of roast chicken and buttered toast, bricked up that entrance, planted me securely in this world again.

So, on the other end of mortality, I see my mother lingering yet with us, in profound and complicated manifestations, in the four of us — her husband and three children — and her four grandchildren as she drifts into her new realm.

In the house where I grew up, my mother and her neighbor bickered over ownership of an enormous forsythia that straddled their property line. As I walk around, planting and watering a lilac tree, stacking firewood, raking, I’m tugged to these delicate gold petals, so brief, such a long struggle, so miraculously splendid.

Darkness overtakes us on our way 

in my lodging the roof leaks 

weeping cherries in flower 

— Buson

Strangers’ sweetness, flying United.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In a sleepwalking haze, I make my way from Albuquerque’s sunny airport to slushy gray Denver (winter, again?!) On the cross-country flight, I make friends with my seatmate, tossing away the nap option for our conversation about camping at Zion National Park. We part ways at Dulles. Walking through the airport’s chaos, I remember that Zion trip in our green Jeep when I was a girl. We tubed down the river all day. I smacked my hip on a rock. That evening, we devoured sausages roasted over a fire, admired the moonrise. Such happy hours.

Later, descending into Burlington, Vermont, the plane cuts down through the brilliant clouds, the underbelly smoky gray, furled with nascent rain or snow. A crimson blush scrims over the mountains, the merest beginnings of tree buds. Dusk hovers. I think of my daughter waiting for me in the nearly empty airport, all grown up now, car keys in her hand. I’m hungry for whatever food she’s brought and, mostly, for the conversation on our drive home.

As the plane brakes on the tarmac, the young couple with the baby beside me remarks that this was their baby’s first plane trip. Around me, the passengers cheer, “What a baby!” but quietly, so the little one isn’t frightened. The parents glow with happiness, the baby coos contentedly, the crowd keeps on, “Great baby! Great baby!” Such a long journey this has been and will be; so happy I am to hear this joyful mantra.

…. Last, a little more about my mother.

What twenty bucks brings.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

My father asked me to include the whole W.H. Auden poem I quoted in the previous post. The poem reads:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, 
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, 
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum 
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead 
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, 
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, 
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. 

He was my North, my South, my East and West, 
My working week and my Sunday rest, 
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; 
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. 

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; 
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; 
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; 
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

I’ll add this, too: a stunning blossom year for the plum tree my parents planted years ago. They bought the tree for twenty bucks. Would a fruit tree take in the desert, my mother wondered. My father reasoned, Heck, it’s twenty bucks. The tree will grow, or not. The tree thrived.

Stop all the clocks.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments
Santa Fe, many years ago

In this space, I’ve stepped between the mossy threads of my own life. For many years, my mother who lived far from me kept up with my life through my blog. I’d started writing stonysoilvermont the summer my then-husband and I split up. I was about to publish my first book. Although I’ve considered quitting, I’ve kept on, the disciplined scraps of this writing feeding into my creative life.

So it seems right to acknowledge my mother’s passing over into the next realm. A woman of nearly indomitable strength, she was ill for many years and surmounted multiple surgeries and illnesses. But none of us are mortal. My mother, who was a nurse for decades, knew this more keenly than most people. When I was a girl, she returned every morning at breakfast with stories from the hospital, some funny and some heart-wrenching — a child with leukemia, a cab driver shot point-blank in his head. One July morning, she carried home an orange kitten. We named him Oliver, and he lived a long full cat life.

Same, too, with my mother, a woman whose strength and passion shaped my own. In her later years, disease made her wander back and forth in time, into places where none of us could follow. My mother would have wanted us to grieve the end of her life, but not to fall dramatically on our knees. Raised a Lutheran, she was imminently practical. Nonetheless, I remember when I was 21, and my mother grieved her own mother. She stopped all the clocks.

Your own darkness.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

An old friend from years ago sends me a message. She’s persistent, wearing down through my imposed or self-imposed hermitage, whatever this thing is I’m doing, and I drive myself out on muddy roads. She has such a lovely little girl, I’m smitten immediately. I sit down on the floor and chat up the child, and eventually remember my good friend and how much I enjoy her world. She’s funny, with boundless good will and cleverness, in a life that’s had her share of lemons.

End of March, nearly Easter, my perennials spike up further every day. How the earth desires green. I’m far enough along now in my own life that I know the cupboard of my mortal life will always hold certain grooves and scars, its beaten shape, the way the material in my life has shaped me. Aren’t we all that way, though? Maybe this is why spring is the dearest of seasons, that from mud and ice emerge tender shoots, the improbable made manifest every year.

Beginning

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.   
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon’s young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

— James Wright