poetry

Election Day.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

On this election day, I hang out the laundry in a bitter wind, sharply turned from the weekend’s balminess. Pinning up t-shirts and dresses, I think of Henry David Thoreau’s famous words:

“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.” 

I read in Walden in high school and took that copy with me when I moved to Vermont. I simply never returned it, and imagined Thoreau wouldn’t have been particularly opposed to my theft. On this windy day, the laundry won’t need long to dry, which is perhaps just as well as the dark moves in now by suppertime. Last night, in the passenger seat of my daughter’s car, the early night pressed around us — enchanting or foreboding? I could have leaned either way. As I pin up the last of the kitchen towels, I keep thinking of the line There will be no catharsis. These words came in a conversation about a recent death in our town. How much we all seem to long for a revelation, the loaves and fishes thing, the who’s in the know and has the real scoop about the true and genuine causes of this or that unhappiness. History, of course, prevails upon all of us, pushing down our small lives, our dear dramas.

Like Thoreau, I am a New Englander, and November leans in with her force.We all might be the wiser for being out in her wind today.

Mid-October.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

In the night, a wild wind throws rain through my bedroom window. It’s before midnight. At twilight, the maples shimmered with a rosy-golden light, but our world has shifted. The wind’s tempestuous, shaking the storm against my house, driving away that autumn dreaminess.

The cats and I are awake. I lie on the couch, reading Ducks. Our little world has seen a proliferation of cats recently — a gray one the neighbors’ boys named Follower, a glossy black, a white-and-brown tabby, a tortoiseshell. The light on the back porch kicks on when the cats, one by one, appear, sodden, and then race off again. A raccoon sniffs my sandals I’ve left out beneath the overhang. My two cats stare through the window, mesmerized.

All night long, all day long, leaves fall. The butternut tree I planted a five years ago is skinny trunk and branch. Magnificently golden, the neighbors’ maples shed their leaves into a giant carpet. Their little boys rake and burrow. As their top branches reveal their starkness, the height of these trees soars above our houses.

October, and midday the light is tinged with sootiness as the sun bends away from my place on the earth. Whether it’s the pandemic or where I am in life, the old patterns I knew for years have splintered, fractured. To my list I write long before dawn, I add: cover the garden with leaves.

The water wheel spins
holding up the milky way,
and then spills it out.

– Kawasaki Tenkō

Green Apples.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments
I flee work early with my daughter and her dog, to watch my younger daughter play soccer. Mid-October, and in my world everyone clamors to be outside as much as possible.

In the parking lot, a rusty white Toyota pickup sports a peeling bumpersticker with Joseph Campbell’s advice: Follow your bliss.

In my young woman days, I wholeheartedly championed this, easy-peasy, of course, I thought. Then I entered what seemed like a labyrinthian period of my life where the notion of bliss seemed facile and sometimes outright stupid. On this sunny afternoon, I chat with parents and strangers on the grass about little things — who’s started their furnace already and the merits of sprinkling cinnamon on hot oatmeal and is that the new superintendent with the coach?

As the sun heads down, the spectators pull on jackets. The wiser among us brought blankets. I find my hat in my car and loan my daughter my jacket. My youngest is a senior. Next year I won’t be here, clustered among the parents and grandparents, and so each game seems a bead on a counting game. On the way home, we stop at the general store for curried dumplings.

All afternoon I kept thinking of Ruth Stone’s achingly lovely poem “Green Apples.”

In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
To the back porch
And slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
Telling me something:
Saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
And rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long;
Shaking me in my sleep
Like a definition of love,
Saying, this is the moment,
Here, now.

Peak Foliage, Thursday 1:35 p.m.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

… or so I predict. Such a silly thing. The branches of some trees have already blown bare, others are just beginning their radiance. It’s later that the torches of tamaracks will begin.

On these stunningly beautiful autumn days, the cats and I wake early. They’re easily satisfied with a few morsels of cat food, a rub on their furry heads, a few more sticks in the wood stove. The two of them stretch on the rug before the stove, worshipping.

Daughter and I go about our day. Coffee and dishes and firewood. At night, I dream of spring peepers.

Here’s not the famous lines from Robert Frost that rattle through my mind these days. Instead, Ezra Pound:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Ezra Pound

Some Miles.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

So many miles passed this weekend. Two trips to Vermont’s big city of Burlington for the Green Mountain Book Festival — Saturday as a participant, Sunday as audience. One trip alone, one trip with a friend. This past summer, I put some genuine effort into what I named my own personal healing project from the isolation and sadness of the pandemic — a project I admittedly dabbled in, without real expectation of success.

Here’s what I did: I gardened, spent as much time outside as possible, swam whenever I could, slept under the stars, and basically tried hard not to care very much (or maybe be distracted) by things that don’t mean very much.

What a pleasure to be back among the literary world, where people walked in and out of rooms in the lovely Fletcher Free Library, listening to poets and writers, the young and the very old, talk about writing. In an innate kind of way, these are my people.

Outside, rain fell in a dismal September day. I’m not a cardholder at this library and have only intermittently walked through its doors. Sitting in the main reading room in my raspberry-jam-hue sweater, I could have kept listening to the stories, language pared down and muscular, judicious with adjectives, evocative of Vermont and the people living here.

Media spin notwithstanding, the pandemic hasn’t vanished. Our world has been upended. And yet we move on.

A few lines from Jay Parini who graciously read beside me this weekend:

“It is not an easy thing to alter the trajectory of your life. People have expectations on your behalf. You come to believe them yourself.” 

And, last, I’ve kindly been invited to the North Danville Library this coming Tuesday, 7 p.m.

Here we are…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Above pretty much sums up where we are now. 23 years into this parenting gig, it’s now me and the teen, and if a housecat has moved into a box on the kitchen table for the winter? Well, so be it. And the other cat refuses to drink water except on the kitchen sink? Well, so be that, too.

As a young mother, I read a literal library of parenting advice and made a trillion mistakes. I take my (diminished) reading time much more seriously these days. I continue to make mistakes. And I’ve decided the cats are fine companions, even on the table.

In so many versions of my previous life, this wouldn’t fly. Now, listening to Biden talk about his proclaimed End of the Pandemic, I wonder, What’s all that about? Who gets to decide what, anyway, and why believe anyone else when your experience doesn’t jive?

Rain comes down in buckets. A friend gives us a bucket of apple drops. I cook bacon in the oven and buy the best loaf of bread I can find for our dinner. Our tomato and basil plants are still churning out their delectables. Sure, winter is in the near offing. Much more than winter, too. Our cat is the happiest creature I’ve ever loved. We offer him drops of milk on our fingertips, licks of butter from a smooth silver knife, tender kisses on his head.

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

— William Carlos Williams