poetry

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

July, in stillness and fury.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 12 Comments

Restless, these July days long and, I kid you not, fragrant with fat pink roses in my yard, I’m at a nearby pond not long before twilight, craving company and coolness. I crouch along the shoreline. Save for one sole swimmer, the water lies flat. From the one house along this wooded stretch, laughter spills.

As a child, my sibs and I had a picture book by Leo Leonni about a mouse named Frederick, an artistic rodent soul who saved up the colors of the summer to share in storytelling, hunkered down in the mouse nest, to get his tribe through the dark winter. Likewise, July. In a patch of mucky reeds, forget-me-nots stretch up, teeny blue blossoms. Surely these flowers fit into the biological world for some specific and clever reason. This evening, they’re simply delightful.

Far down the pond, the loons call, exquisite tremolo. This evening, I’m yet humming from Ocean Vuong’s recent reading in Greensboro, how he did that rare thing: in a theater of hundreds of souls, he read simply to me, as I let my knitting fall into my lap and I leaned forward against the balcony’s railings, listening and marveling, his words a river of shoveling snow and absent fathers, of napalm in the jungle and American factories, and how history and bloodshed and the resilience of poetry bind us as a species—each of us a unique drop in that river of flowing time.

The pond’s chill gnaws my flesh. On the sandy mud, we eat cherries. Talking, we will solve exactly none of the world’s conundrums tonight. The loons appear, two parents, two fledglings, on an evening swim and fish hunt. I’ve been here before, stark winter, silent ice, the crunch of snow beneath my boots. Now, the biting insects cluster along my bare legs, claiming bite-sized sips of my blood.

Last, a few readings for Call It Madness coming up. Please come, if you’re around my edge of Vermont, in sweet July.

Meadow Meeting House, in Corinth, VT, Sunday, July 12, 3 pm, with the remarkable Sasha Hom.

Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, VT, Tuesday, July 14, 7 pm.

A novelist, however, sees the idea of ‘a leisurely life’ as practically synonymous with ‘the waning of one’s creativity.’ For novelists are like certain types of fish. If they don’t keep swimming forward, they die. — Haruki Murakami

Dumpster Raiding, Poetry, Independence Day.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Ocean Vuong reads at a nearby arts center that is built in a farm field with a stage modeled on the Globe Theater. My friend and I cruise in, nearly late, and the parking lot is full. Hundreds of people have arrived. On this holiday weekend, I’ve swam and eaten ice cream, stepped inadvertently from friend to friend, like the twilight walk that ended in darkness on a trail, two small women talking, talking, fireworks booming in the blackness around us.

Vuong reads mesmerizingly, like a dream. He begins with remarking that humanity began in poetry and war, and how this will shake out after the Anthropocene is yet of course to be determined. By the reading’s end, I wipe tears from eyes. Immensely talented, utterly humble, Vuong offered homage to craft of storytelling—its essential role in all human life—and to the women who raised him. Four Vietnamese women in hardscrabble Massachusetts wrested free from their bad men and raised seven sons. None of these women were writers, but they were all oral storytellers who told their stories to salvage their dignity from the harms of the men. The repair was for their sons—and themselves.

And the poetry and war where Vuong began? By the hour’s end, his words stream through me, like that Buddhist retreat I attended last summer, my body still bitten by cancer to more bones than flesh. In those days, for fleeting moments I could envision my own near death, that this body I’ve used so hard will go down into soil and stone, that tendrils of roots and melting snow will erase me from this world of language and teeming desire, and yet I will have never gone anywhere at all.

Likewise, listening, I realize the poet carried all of us, not one more than another, along his mellifluous words, that the human history of this country, America, is inextricably bound in the polarity of war and poetry, a profound rushing flood of passing time and undefinable generations.

Later, my dear friend headed home to her dog and her life, I wandered along the back end of the village where a dumpster lies overturned. From the rubble, I extricated a glossy Dorothea Lange photo, the famous portrait of a mother and children. I rolled it up and tucked it beneath my arm. For you, I write for you, because you are me.

NOTHING

We are shoveling snow, this man and I, our backs coming closer
along the drive. It’s so quiet I can hear every flake on my coat. I
used to cry in a genre no one read. What a joke, they said, on fire.
There’s no money in it, son, they shouted, smoke leaking from
their mouths. But ghosts say funny things when they’re family.
This man and I, we take the weight of what will vanish anyway
and move it aside, making room. There is so much room in a
person there should be more of us in here. I wave to you, traveler,
inches away but never visible from where I am. Are you warm
where you are? Are you you where you are? Something will come
of this. In one of the rooms in the house the man and I share, a
loaf of rye is rising out of itself, growing lighter as it takes up more
of the world. In humans, we call this Aging. In bread, we call
it Progress. We’re in our thirties now and I rolled the dough just an
hour ago, pushing my glasses up my nose with my flour-dusted
palm as I read, reread, the hand-scrawled recipe given me by the
man’s grandmother, the one who, fleeing Stalin, bought a ticket
from Vilnius to Dresden without thinking it would stop, it so
happened, in Auschwitz (it was a town after all), where she and
her brother were asked to get off by soldiers who whispered, keep
moving, keep moving like sons leading their mothers through
wheat fields in the night. How she passed through huddled coats,
how some were herded down barb-wired lanes. The smoke from
our mouths rising as the man and I bend and lift, in silence, the
morning clear as one inside a snow globe. For how can we know,
with a house full of bread, that it’s hunger, not people, that
survives? The man pours a bag of salt over the pavement. But
from where I’m standing it looks like light is spilling out of him,
like the ray of dusty sun that found his grandmother’s hands as
she got back on the train, her brother at her side, smoke from the
engine blown across the faces outside blurring into pine forests,
warped pastures, empty houses with full rooms. The man
clutches his stomach as if shot, and the light floods out of him, I
mean you—because something must come of this. Poetry makes
nothing happen, someone who is dead now said after a friend’s
death. When the guard asked your grandmother if she was
Jewish, she shook her head, half-lying, then took from her bag a
roll, baked the night before, tucked it in the guard’s chest pocket.
She didn’t look back as the train carried her, newly seventeen,
toward where I now stand, on a Sunday in Florence,
Massachusetts, squinting at her faded words: sift flour, then beat
eggs until “happy-yellow.” The train will reach Dresden days before
the sky is filled with firebombers. More smoke. A bullet in her
brother under rubble, his name everywhere outside her like the
snow falling on your face forty years later, on December 2, 1984,
while your mother carries you, alive only three hours, the few
steps to the mini-van where your grandmother, nearly sixty now,
crowns your head with her brother’s name. Peter! she says, Peter!
Peter! as if the dead could be called back from rubble into new,
stunned bones. The snow has started up again, whitening the
path as though nothing happened. Oh, to live like a bullet, to
touch people with such purpose. To be born going one way,
toward everything alive. To walk into the world you never asked
for but then choose the room where your hunger ends—which
part of war do we owe such knowledge? It’s warm in this house
where we will die, you and I. Let the stanza be one room, then.
Let it be big enough for everyone, even the ghosts rising now
from this bread we tear open to see what we’ve made of each
other. I know, we’ve been growing further apart, unhappy but
half full. That clearing snow and baking bread will not save us. I
know, too, as I reach across the table to brush the leftover ice
from your beard, that it’s already water. It’s nothing you say,
laughing for the first time in weeks. It’s really nothing. And I believe
you. I shouldn’t, but I do.

~ Ocean Vuong

June’s Snow.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

We eat on the back deck of a little restaurant in Plainfield, Vermont, home of the former Goddard College, its campus now morphing towards its next phase. In Plainfield, there’s hand-lettered LOVE signs everywhere, a sense that people are doing interesting things like writing novels in verse in treehouses, and folks say hi when we pass on the sidewalks, as if they know us. And maybe they do. Tiny Vermont.

Rain sprinkles around the table’s umbrella. Overhead, leaning back, I spy a puzzle piece of blue sky, a horn of the half moon.

Solstice, the longest day of the year, fragrant with roses, a serenade of toad songs. Afterwards, we walk along the river, then uphill, where the floods in the past few years cut the hillside, rammed silt and rock into houses that remain, people-less, doubtlessly waiting for FEMA money that may or may not arrive, an excavator, another breaking. We turn and wander through higher ground, where gardens flourish green and pink. Hammocks are strung for summer reading in porches.

June’s ineffable loveliness.

In the long twilight I drive home, my tires splashing through puddles where rain has fallen hard and missed us. Around Woodbury Lake, the mist layers among the emerald hills, the sky’s deepening blue, sunset gold. Beloved Vermont, relishing her own beauty. I don’t pause, the radio off, only me and my own stray thoughts. I drive north on this road where I’ve traveled for so many years, in so many kinds of weather, passing the place of the terrible recent accident, the unspeakable tragedy, and then I’m in little Woodbury village again. Wetlands and church and school and post office. Fog trails around me.

I’m not at all a churchgoing woman, but the phrase yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death clangs through me, resonates in my soul and body like a bell’s clapper. The dearness of this life, so easily torn.

At home, in the thin wisps of light, I wander through my garden, the campion white, the mock orange blossoms June’s snow. Through my neighbors’ windows, laughter spills.

“Peonies at Dusk,” Jane Kenyon

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.

Dividing line: rivers running north and south.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Lost, I spend a crazy amount of time on back roads, driving from here to there, searching for a house where I’ve never been. A porcupine ambles along a dirt road. I slow, the car windows rolled down, the sunroof open and dust drifting in. The quilled creature disappears into the roadside weeds. I follow the paved state highway north, a two-line twisting road that cuts through farm fields jeweled with blooming dandelions.

I find them, finally, this kind couple, and apologize for my lateness. Turns out, they’ve worried about me. We stand outside in the sunlight, with their little dog and their grown daughter who stops by, this witty and laughing family who has endured tragedy. We’re on a rise of land that overlooks a pond. We are at the dividing place, I learn, where water flows both south and north. As we talk on this old homestead, I sense the world’s expanse, how brooks and streams and thin rivers join immense lakes, powerful rivers, the mighty beast of the Atlantic Ocean. Around us rises the history of this homestead, how the house and family has grown and contracted and changed over the decades. Spread overhead, the gleaming night sky, the pinprick constellations.

Black flies chew my hairline. Post-chemo, my lost straight hair returned as ringlets. On my way again, I retrace my way through swamps dense with marsh marigold. On this sunny day, the trees push out new leaves, further, further, in these few hours. I return to a former school house, where the town is voting again that day on a failed school budget. People come and go, cheery with the spring weather. I stay late for a hearing and drive home under a blood-red sunset, the breeze through my car windows sweet with plowed earth and manure.

How furiously I labor to remain in this world. To savor the inevitability of lostness, the chance crossing of a porcupine on its solitary animal journey, the stunning May blossoms. Many months ago, I asked my brilliant oncologist what I did to invite lymphoma into my body. Vehemently, he replied that I’d done nothing, absolutely nothing, to cause this brutal disease.

This physician saved my ragged life, but do our philosophical planes align? Two years ago, as the cancer sunk its silent teeth into my flesh, those intertwined demons of fatigue and despair shook me, too. Always now, skimming beneath my days and nights, flickers that fear: relapse. I’d spent so much time, that winter of illness, in the Dartmouth ED that the nurses and MDs became familiar. They knew my daughters and I by name. The general surgery team appeared repeatedly in that huddle around my bed, and I began to understand the hues of that word restraint as they considered their surgeon thoughts. There was that dreadful evening when I informed the oncologist that I could endure no more, and he gently replied that I could. He would get me through. So I endured. Many years ago, when I was so young, 21 and naive and freshly falling in love, I whined to a professor that I could not finish my thesis; I’d done enough. He kindly informed me that someday I would write a book and I would fear I would never reach the end. All this, in fact, transpired.

Restraint and effusive joy. Sooty despair, the pleasure of a purring cat. As the night settled down through twilight, I drank tea on my back step, leaning against my house. A fox trotted across the violet-strewn grass, quickly, on its way. So much for monotone winter. Wild spring.

Dandelion 

The first of a year’s abundance of dandelions 

is this single kernel of bright yellow 

dropped on our path by the sun, sensing 

that we might need some marker to help us 

find our way through life, to find a path 

over the snow-flattened grass that was 

blade by blade unbending into green, 

on a morning early in April, this happening 

just at the moment I thought we were lost 

and I’d stopped to look around, hoping 

to see something I recognized. And there 

it was, a commonplace dandelion, right 

at my feet, the first to bloom, especially 

yellow, as if pleased to have been the one, 

chosen from all the others, to show us the way.

~ Ted Kooser