poetry

Cutting grass at night…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

I’m finishing mowing the front lawn when my neighbor opens her door and hollers, “Hey, there!” across her driveway. Save for a series of apartments in my twenties, I’ve never lived so close to another house and moved here, in fact, from a house that was surrounded by wilderness.

She’s a darn good neighbor. Twilight fattens to darkness as we talk about small things — a mutual friend who visited her, red roses blooming yet by her door. My pink cottage beauties have long since dried up.

I’ve lived long enough now in this town to have experienced the meanness of catty gossip and the kindness of strangers; nothing different from any other town or city, I suppose, simply the variety of human behavior, the tenor of thinking that makes me satisfied to be standing here in this dew-dampening grass, listening. A fallen pear that’s split by the mower blade bleeds its sweetness into the evening.

It’s a harvest full moon night, diminished by the eclipse and then returned. I sleep with the windows wide open, the moonlight on my curled cat who’s sleeping in his own cat way, more dream than rest, busy at his own cat magic. Here, too, I can hear the traffic on route 15, coming and going, going and coming. At 3:30 a.m., the traffic stills. The tree frogs sizzle on.

As a girl, we traveled summers in a green jeep and slept in tiny nylon tents. Waking in the night on those cross-country trips, I’d hear the interstate. So curious I was to know where everyone was headed. I repeated all that again in my hungry twenties. For a summer, we lived near the river in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Every night, the train whistle bleated mournfully, passing through. Here I am now, in my fifties, lying awake, listening. The scent of the grass I cut that evening drifted into our house. In the moonlight, my cat lifts his head, questioning. “We’re here,” I counsel, “all’s well.” He tucks himself back into his curl. The moon and the frogs keep on. A milk truck rumbles by, pushing us towards day.

Two autumns…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

I leave the garden to do its final hallelujah of the season, the tithonia and sunflowers and cosmos fraying now, the basil still slipping into my cooking pot. September 11, the morning I stood in my sun-filled kitchen watching my toddler tricycle around the table, listening to public radio and wondering what was happening. My youngest was not yet born. Now, 23 years later, my daughters and I text during the debate. My cats are curled at my feet, in their usual, wise cat-disdain way, thinking their feline thoughts, savoring like any smart creature the warmth from the wood stove.

On my evening walk, I meandered the long way home. A half moon hung in the sky, sweet as maple pudding, so near I imagined I could reach out and lay my fingertips on its smooth sheen. Early autumn. So much more to come.

for me going

for you staying—

two autumns

– Buson

Hard, Sweet Pears.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The couple who owned this house before me planted two pear trees in the front yard. The runt leans into the lilac hedge, as if hiding its crown. The taller has expanded into a pear tree version of pirouetting ballerina. Late afternoon, after pulling out withered lily leaves from the flowerbeds, I pluck two hard sweet pears and head over to the neighbor.

She’s created an unusual little garden with little pools of running water, so the delight is for your ears, too. I hadn’t realized it was the anniversary of her husband’s passing. We sit in her garden while the sun sinks down, talking about random things — work and the school board and gardens. The little boys across the street bike into her driveway. She’s parked as far back as possible to give the children a little more space on our tiny street.

When chilly shadows cover the garden, I stand, throw my pear core into her weeds, say goodnight. The boys have been called in for the night. As the cold edges in, mist thickens in the valley below. I watch how those cloud layers drift, cushioning the village, layered work just for the night. Then I pick another pear for breakfast.

Some days I find myself wondering how I’ve landed in this town, what random circumstances drove me here. There’s that trite old phase that the only constant is change, but of course that’s not true, either. All around us flow the steadiness of children, of loss, of those ripening pears.

September: such a pretty, sweet month.

Blackberry Eating

By Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

Immensity taps at your life…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

Nearing the end of August, the wild around our village house is mightily fortressing. The path behind our house has been given up this summer by friends; those who visit arrive via the street where the grass has broken the pavement, too, crisscrossed the gray with emerald. In the ravine behind our house, the foxes have kitted again this year. Randomly, the youngsters come out to chase each other. My daughter, who unexpectedly met the hissing mama fox, gave up that path a few years back. Only I now claw my way through the blackberry brambles, whistling, scraping my bare knees in some kind of penance for passing through their realm.

This year, while the human world on a great and local level has worked at its less admirable traits, the natural world has flourished. My daughters and I hold the apples and pears, gauging not yet, not yet. All around, a rioting of blossom and vine of what I’ve sown — sunflowers and morning glories, love lies bleeding — and the lushness of goldenrod, wild honeysuckle, creeping cucumber.

Oh, sweet illusion of Vermont’s August, as if stark November will skip her own visit this year….. On this dewy morning, smoke-drenched from wildfires so far distantly north, a favorite poem from Jane Hirshfield.

“Tree”

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this 
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books–

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.”
― Jane Hirshfield

A sense of urgency…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My youngest and I are watching a track-and-field race in the Olympics when a commentator remarks that a runner needs to up her sense of urgency to medal. In the humid night, the fan whirring through the crickets’ amped-up August songs, I keep riffing on the sense of urgency… My god, what does that actually mean?

Early August, and I always remember Hayden Carruth’s poem “August 1,” its line: The world is a/complex fatigue. Which perhaps sums up these days, so humid the yellow coreopsis flowers gleam, the cats sprawl on the kitchen floor, hungry for coolness. This summer has been fat with growth, the butternut and walnut trees I planted seven years ago spreading into their own canopy, already offering shade for me to lie beneath, as I read in the late afternoons.

Someday, perhaps, I’ll look back at this year as it’s own of kind of waiting — which way will this world tip? Even as I’m busy, busy with my urgency of work and gardening, my perpetual lists, of finish these three projects and then paint the back of the house, the outside world burrows in. Some of this is our own story, as my daughter heads back to college soon, but some are my own observations — the two battered cars crammed along the riverbank from the last flood, the perpetual national dialogue — and my wondering, which way might this go?

Urgency, raw want. At the farmers market, I see my daughters’ father across the field, appeared again from wherever he’s hidden. I hold a hot cardboard box of dumplings while the market crowd swirls around me. I turn to talk with a friend and when I look back again, he’s disappeared. Meanwhile, dumplings and curry in my hands: the urgency of eating, the words and life we’ll share over this savory meal, this evening, these moments.

August First

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.

Koan answer.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

It’s dark in the mornings now when I wake, the light silently seeping over the hillside, creating a new day. Late afternoons, I swim after work. Ten geese accompany me. The next afternoon, I swim towards two young boys fishing from the bridge. Their line holds the sunlight, a line thin as a spider’s web.

Late July, I’ve been here before, the garden wealthy in basil. July: the season to relish the fatness of hydrangeas, cucumber vines gone rouge among the onions, ice cream made on a nearby farm. The overcast sky touches the line of trees, the green fields. As my friend and I talk, a hawk circles low over the field. Our conversation winds back to that question I keep asking these days — where to find solidity in a time that increasingly veers to stridency, to a yawping against a fracturing world.

The hawk dives and nabs its meal, then vanishes into the treeline.

Rain begins to patter. All this past month, as I’ve been traveling across the country and then working with a Vermont Selectboard, listening to the news and following the storylines of those around me, I keep thinking of Yeats’ famous line that “the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” An ordinary late July early evening, the swallows dipping in and out of the treeline. I stand for a moment, watching. The boys’ fishing line shone like the thinnest rod of light, vanishing into the dark water. The two children stood on the bridge, chattering and pointing. Perhaps the answer to my koan.