poetry

Dazzling light.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Here’s the weird thing about this March: cabin fever is not a thing. March has always marked the time of year when snow and cold has piled unrelentingly on us for veritable months. Not so, this warm year. But climate change does squat for the dearth of light, and certainly nothing for the dissatisfaction that’s creeping into our social consciousness. I am a woman who craves the planetary might of blooming crocuses, the radiant headiness of a forest strewn with spring beauties, the serene hover of a bee tucked into a downy apple blossom. Patience, patience.

Walking home from the library, a sudden snowfall drenches my eyelashes.

On this early morning, poetry:

Strewn

It’d been a long winter, rags of snow hanging on; then, at the end

of April, an icy nor’easter, powerful as a hurricane. But now

I’ve landed on the coast of Maine, visiting a friend who lives

two blocks from the ocean, and I can’t believe my luck,

out this mild morning, race-walking along the strand.

Every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running

for the sheer dopey joy of it. No one’s in the water,

but walkers and shellers leave their tracks on the hardpack.

The flat sand shines as if varnished in a painting. Underfoot,

strewn, are broken bits and pieces, deep indigo mussels, whorls

of whelk, chips of purple and white wampum, hinges of quahog,

fragments of sand dollars. Nothing whole, everything

broken, washed up here, stranded. The light pours down, a rinse

of lemon on a cold plate. All of us, broken, some way

or other. All of us dazzling in the brilliant slanting light.

— Barbara Crocker

Necessary Birdsongs.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments
Lake Champlain

Mid-March, the unlovely muddy Vermont: I bend beneath the snarled rose bushes, seeking green nubs pushing through the wet earth. By June, this world will be verdant, lush, those old roses a tangle of green, tiny blossoms each a delicate bouquet of pale pink. These roses, planted by someone doubtlessly long passed over into the other world, ruggedly fence my house, their flowers such a dear sweet fragrance.

In this brown world, I wander to the places where, in springs past, I’ve heard the early songs of redwing blackbirds. Yesterday, I hear these birds, not the full chorus yet, but the warm-up crew. We are well before the yard clean-up and gardening season. The town roads are rutted, hard to travel, and the summer folks have not yet returned. Hidden in this clump of cedars, the blackbirds steadily, without any fuss, go about their blackbird lives. Not so many weeks away, marsh marigolds will blanket these wetlands — dazzling yellow, killer green — but for now, the dun palette of silvery cedar, umber earth, the birdsong melodies yanking us along to spring.

“Dear March—Come in—”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

I stand outside eating a cheese sandwich stuffed with a handful of the lettuce I bought for my cat Acer. The trees across the road shake furiously in a wind as if outraged. What’s your complaint, I wonder.

Such a strange winter: a handful of skiing days, no ice skating, the hard cold a distant memory. The yuck of this winter has been the lack of sunlight, the sodden clouds that have lingered from last year’s rainy summer through January’s gloom. We kvetch. My own antidote is the early morning, my insistence that writing, that order and beauty, are a transformative might. There’s nothing new in that approach; it’s the ancient path of seeking luminosity, of Rumi’s words that the wound is where the light comes in.

In March, of course, sudden sunlight in your living room is apt to reveal the dirty cat hair clusters balled beneath your couch, the cobwebs trailing from the ceiling corner, drenched in dust. Make of it what you will.

Oh March, my long-time friend, giver of fine weather, betrayer with your miserable cold snowstorms. In the lengthening days, the sun returns like a long-ago lover. My friend the sun and I take long walks, my sunny friend whispering in my ear that brighter lovelier days are already here.

A few lines from Emily Dickinson:

Dear March—Come in—
How glad I am—
I hoped for you before—
Put down your Hat—
You must have walked—
How out of Breath you are—
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest—
Did you leave Nature well—
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me—
I have so much to tell—

Vermont’s fifth season: mud.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

I carry my laptop out the backdoor of Hardwick’s coffee shop. A couple I know pulls up on their fat tire bikes and rave about the biking. There’s an adage in Vermont that the state’s fifth season is mud season. The first week of March is way early for the back roads to break up. Most towns post their roads around March 15, prohibiting heavy trucks, like log or delivery trucks, from destroying already soft roads. Now, towns have already posted these warnings, ribboned with orange survey tape, a sure sign that winter is on the wane.

I meet a friend at a former golf course now owned by the city of Montpelier where people let their dogs run. The course is last year’s brown grass, but when I squint I can see emerging green beginning shimmer, pushing back the dull amber. How much the world leans into living.

My oldest daughter calls from New Mexico, on her journey to visit the grandparents. Through our phones, her face glows with desert light. I think of her driving around Santa Fe, this old adobe city and the stunning landscape an infinitely complex story that stretches so far back. Within that human history, my own family story lodges in with its numerous plot points. Ah, family… never a straight line.

T. S. Eliot wrote of that April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm… Mud season may be the least loved. But in my mind, it’s the sweetest. Sap runs. The softening ground sucks our boots into its stickiness. Tender green unfurls, strengthens. We move, onward.

March 1: Cabin Fever, the Impossibility of Spring.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

March: a day of singing chickadees, mushy ice, all the little paths running with thaw, twinkling in the sunlight with the promise of what I cheerily call early spring! The next morning, the temperature pegs itself solidly at 15 degrees and refuses to budge. I walk down to the post office, the wind scraping my cheeks. What grit of sandpaper is this? 80? 60?

Vermont late winter/spring is the season of vehement vacillating, of freeze and melt, sun, snow, rain. It’s the season of cold hands, flushed cheeks.

Late into the night I lie on the floor reading Leslie Jamison: “It’s what fairy tales have been trying to tell us for centuries. Don’t be afraid of never getting what you want. Be afraid of what you’ll do with it.”

March: the lurching season of cabin fever, of Where are those crocuses, anyway? Will flowers ever bloom again? I bake a cheesecake, fill bird feeders, have one, two, three essays picked up by little mags. The waning moon shines up the rutted mud, the dregs of snow. Early morning, the birds are at it, singing for dear life, tugging in spring.

Don’t let your cow get the upper hand, er, hoof…?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Ah, February, the month with the strange “U” that children stumble to spell. Two inches of a sugar snow this morning when I carried out the stove’s ashes, the cardinals whistling the day alive, a buttery full moon charming the evening sky. For the past few weeks, my life has overflowed with the challenges of faraway aging parents, with details mundane and immense, and all very very real. There’s that Tolstoy saying about families unhappy in their own way. Carrying in firewood, I remind myself: families endure the unspeakable in their own particular vernacular, swaddled in the way of all human life.

Sugaring season is hustling into Vermont now. The years I spent sugaring with a husband and two young daughters taught me to strip away the unnecessary, to bend into work when bending is required. It’s a habit I’ve carried to writing, and I’ve managed now to write three books against odds that even now seem not in my favor. But it was single parenting that honed my skills to grasp the nourishing in times of hardness, suck hard the marrow of the real. In a conversation with a young homesteader and poet today, she offers me a line of wisdom so pithy and wise I laugh out loud: Don’t let your milk cow get the upper hand on you. Yeah, think that one over.

Here’s a David Goodman interview with Elizabeth Price, mother of the young Palestinian man Hisham Awartani who was shot with two friends in Burlington, Vermont, last November. The family epitomizes courage, knowledge, and depth of heart — highly recommended.