poetry

Snow geese and cancer and macaroni and cheese.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 16 Comments

My friend walks into my kitchen. The windows are shrouded in the remains of last night’s darkness. She bends down and looks at my face, reminding me of those enervating conversations in ERs with doctors. After a careful moment, she pronounces, You look good. My house is warm; her sentence warms me more.

In the St. Johnsbury hospital, she drops me at the laboratory door. A receptionist sends me down the hall, in search of elevators. A woman in the waiting room follows rickety me in my winter boots, and repeats the directions. I wander down halls empty of people, interspersed with lit Christmas trees in what seem to me random corners and notches. Someone calls my name. I turn and look, and of course this is my friend, who for a fleeting moment I don’t recognize in her bundled coat, surgical mask.

Not far from the Canadian border, St.Johnsbury has a faded charm from its former heyday of logging and Fairbanks scales. This December morning, the day sputters, promising no sunlight, maybe a few rosy strands in the opening daybreak. In my strange fog, I wonder if the light mirrors Siberia. My blood is drawn and spun. Waiting for the verdict, I stare out the window, the layers of coal and washed-thin blue and last night’s pale snow. Beside me, a man introduces himself says he owns a garage and towing business. I pull down my mask and offer my name. My voice is so muted he can hardly hear me, but I ask him to tell me about his plowing so far this winter. While we wait, he obliges me. My hands, he says, will never be clean enough for hospitals.

Siberia, I think, Siberia, as the garage owner pinpoints roads. The daylight notches up a bit. Save for my friend, waiting elsewhere, I know no one here, but this winter landscape of snow and pale mountain, the livelihood of working with hands and backs and people, is familiar to me as my thumb knuckles, the loneliness of lingering over the morning’s last cup of cooling black coffee, pondering some decision that’s wormed itself in the day.

So disease, cancer, that forbidding word, burrows in. The disease is me; the blood is mine; the nurse explains numbers, says hematocrit, hemoglobin. Less than a handful of weeks into this journey, I know my blood courses with immutable facts, ragingly powerful chemistry. The blessing to leave is laid upon me.

Home again from distant Siberia — is it midmorning? afternoon’s mire? — my friend sweeps ashes from my wood stove and nourishes gleaming coals with birchbark and splinters, odd pieces of end wood. This day unfurls, somber and patient, settling into winter’s long haul. I offer a piece of my daughter’s gingerbread. For hours now, we’ve talked about migrating snow geese and cancer and macaroni and cheese. She asks if I would take her on a nighttime walk — I envision the throb of spring peepers, the redolent rotting slop of thawing earth — indeed, a pleasure I might give back, to one of my shepherds holding me steady as I wobble down my back steps.

Brutal and Brilliant Lights.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

My brother drives us out of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock conglomeration of soaring windows. Somewhere in the afternoon, the gloaming sifts down through the interstate traffic. The stream of trucks bends south. We head north. Evergreen and gray, a pale blue of mountains ahead. Midwinter, I mutter, but it’s yet late fall, the solstice ahead.

All the way back home, up and down the ribboned swell of interstate, coal night tapping down, I’m jumbled in an unbroken stream of searing hospital lights, the sparklingness of The Good Doctor who sits beside me and then phones me with good news, that the lymphoma and I are parting ways, disease shedding from my unseen flesh.

Now home again, drifting in and out of this perpetual river — of appointments and results, in an unfamiliar body swollen with water that, trickle by trickle, the chemo poisons are doing their fierce work to keep me alive, thrust me towards full health — the strangeness of not being able to lift a piece of birch to feed my stove, kindle my own hearth.

Grave illness is the void. The void is always with us. I know this even as I write with my tabby purring at my knee, epitome of domestic bliss. Maybe that’s why I was compelled to write so savagely in this place about terror. Late summer, as I’d descended into this cancer, without knowing that I was sickening, I could feel myself gyrating in a sucking whirlpool of negativity — from my own particular life and in this unusual time we inhabit. On the eve of the election, the cancer word smashed into my life. A levee burst in me. For me, a woman with cancer (this is no flip joke), these are fraught days, months, more months. But even in illness I’m part of the whirling flux of this time. As we drove out of that glass complex for the first of what will certainly be many times, I was imbued with a sense of magnitude, the mightiness of the tension between life and death and the mightiness of our collective lives, each dear, each interwoven.

I left Dartmouth with a bright red card in my hand from a kind stranger. At home, the sky was overcast. The stars were shrouded. Our dear white clapboard house twinkled with colored and white lights. I stumbled on the top step and fell. My daughter lifted me up and helped me in.

“You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.”
― Denise Levertov

Chemo ride…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

… took a bitch turn. Dreaded day 5 passed (thank goodness for the amazing anti-nausea meds), but with the last bag of this poison/healing fluid, a fist immediately grabbed my chest and squeezed my breath. My cheeks coursed with blood.Terror, say the word, terror. So much back and forth, oxygen and treatments and more liquids through this purple spaghetti plastic that drip, drip, drips near my heart. I shook fiercely – rigors – the nurses said. I was stuck on the word as my molars hammered, rigors!, where is this hard ride taking me? The fluid was stopped with a promise not to start again until I knew.

In and out of a fog, a dream of a herringbone jacket with a pleated flair my youngest wore as a two-year-old. In the evening, a nurse sits with me. As the drip-drops begin again, she talks, right beside me, watching me, close eye, about this disease, about infection and rest, about what I will need to do and avoid – do not knick your fingers with a knife, no dirt, no cat litter, no flowers, no illness. I ease from tension and realize, yes, yes, I am still breathing, I am still taking in this toxin that quite possibly will save my life. I glance up at the round analog clock on the wall that reminds me and my brother of school days. These are the moments Burlington’s Phoenix Books is hosting the Almanac intro in an online event. In my haze, I imagine the Almanac editors and reading and answering questions, this book filled with farm dirt and blooming flowers, hay chaff and sneezing, insects and sheep, and stories – so many stories – of people working on this northern place on the globe. In my half-dream, exchanging novels to read with this steady stranger, I feel my place in the world opening up, both descending into the long trek of illness and healing and, miraculously, an upward course, too, as this illness strips me down. Your bone marrow, the stranger says, marrow, a word I love and have been content to let lie, bone marrow doing its bone marrow thing. All this is changing, too, from nature, from medicine, from my fierce intent to reclaim my body.

All of you who have traveled or will travel this journey, bone marrow and rigors and fear, how simultaneously far and yet close this feels, all of us.

….. Everyday, a dear friend texts me a poem read in her clear strong voice. Here’s Rilke’s “Let Darkness Be a Bell Tower”

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

Hay strands for sheep, purring cat, Harry Potter chocolates for neighbors.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Now in my fifties, I’d lulled myself into believing my risk-taking days were sewed up: those early 20s of getting in the old Volkswagen for journeys of thousands of miles, buy a decrepit hunting shack and convert it into a home, severe a marriage soured terribly and fear he might take your life in retribution — all that time of selling the maple sugaring equipment (who to trust, how to cut a hard deal?). So jaywalking suited me just fine. Waking long before dawn to feed the cats and drink milky coffee, write and watch the sun rise, that streaming beet juice.

As if I held all the cards in the risk-taking plans, anyway. Now that thread of riskiness has spread to those beloved around me, too. More and more, I understand my learning to craft a honed a sentence or the deep pleasure of watching a cardinal pause on a branch, are my steadying rituals of rooting me meaningfully in this world. I have friends whose lives center around sheep and chores and woolly affection, in ways that transformed their lives. Chicken and horse lovers. My sister-in-law with her two goats.

As I write from Room 101, I haven’t forgotten that the world spins on. Last night, I listened to VTDigger’s Dave Goodman’s follow-up conversation with Elizabeth Price, mother of Hisahm Awartani, one of the three young Palestinian men who was shot in Burlington, Vermont, a year ago. The Gaza war reigns. The American presidency shifts.

In Room 101, so many stories of people come my way — the night nurse who studied for two years in England, near the beach, transcontinental; how transport folks and nurses made their to live in New Hamsphire and Vermont, often from places around the country. What do you like here? What have you found? I keep asking, curious to know what roots people in their lives.

The smaller world spins on, too, with its things both miserable, joyous, and pleasurably mundane. Your own rituals of offering hay to sheep, fingertips to a cat’s purring head.

Last day of November, the month of cancer in my world. A year ago I bought Harry Potter chocolates for the neighbors’ boys and waited in the dusk for the three laughing boys to appear around my woodpile. The Good Doctor tells me I will go down, down, soon, and then rise to where I once felt well. What would that mean? I’m hanging on to this unrealized promise.

I repeat. When I go down, I will re-emerge.

Cancer, Election.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

In 2014, my sister was diagnosed with cancer (now healthily in remission), and I read The Emperor of All Maladies: a biography of cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. My marriage also fell apart that year, and I remember reading this fat library book in my car at school pickups, waiting for a job interview in Burlington, on benches waiting for court appearances. It’s a hefty book, with a lot of reading hours.

Three weeks into this flipped-upside-down world, my former life is already receding. I’ve been so surprised and grateful for the effusion of calls and emails, friends stopping by with food and gifts and simply to talk, to share news of their own world and listen to mine. I realize now how carelessly I had ebbed into a cynical place these last few months while the cancer was growing in me, weakening me.

Sure, it’s true that people sometimes give into the uglier strands of lying and cattiness and gossip, of insecurity and strange ways of playing people against each other — and sometimes engage in far worse things. In my Shire of Vermont, I see my decent state struggling with what’s playing out in national politics — and the looming threats. Which made me think, again, as I lay in bed listening to the rain this morning, how our individual lives reflect the greater society. Don’t waste your few days on junk and despair, those adolescent tricks. And thank you, all, for surrounding me with such light.

From Philip Larkin:

What are days for?

Days are where we live.   

They come, they wake us   

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:   

Where can we live but days?

Lantern Light.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

My immense thanks for so much kindness and light sent my way this week…. It’s meant the world to me.

When my daughters were in a sweet little Waldorf nursery school, around this time every year the children made lanterns from canning jars covered with colored tissue paper. The whole school gathered for a vegetable stone soup and then set out for a walk with the lanterns. This is rural Vermont, remember; the nursery school was surrounded by forest and the deep night, and parents carried lighters and matches to relight anyone’s lantern that was snuffed out. In the dark, stumbling a bit, we walked, singing.

Martinmas. I was tugged right into the Waldorf world with its heady folklore and mummers plays, the stories within stories, my natural bent of mind.

A week into the cancer world, veritable novice, walking on November 11, I was thinking of all these powerful layers — Martinmas and Armistice Day and Veterans Day (after WWII and the Korean War) — and the hidden interconnectedness of so many things, String Theory, the magical enchantment of books with stories that seem disconnected and then — whoosh! — are magically revealed at the end.

Maybe this is only my own way of thinking of things, but this uninvited and unwanted cancer that has now joined my body and story could hardly be random. Here I am, on the edge of a journey of indeterminate length, still looking to put these hard pieces together.

And for November, with her lovely gloaming light, a few lines from Adrienne Rich:

… You’re what the autumn knew would happen
after the last collapse
of primary color
once the last absolutes were torn to pieces
you could begin

How you broke open, what sheathed you
until this moment…