poetry

First Things.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughter asks me if I’ve ever almost died — or at least thought I was dying.

She’s lacing her shoes, about to head out for a run. The day has been remarkably warm and beautiful, reaching above fifty degrees.

Three times, I answer: almost drowned when I was a teenager on a canoe trip, your father averted us from a pile up in Seattle, and the anesthesia went awry at your birth.

Later, I walk up to the high school and wait for her. I sit at a picnic table behind the school. It’s the first of all kinds of things again — the first time sitting at a picnic table outside since winter, the first time this spring I’ve seen grass that appears really green. An acquaintance stops to talk, and we swap stories about the school and board, new hires. Her grown son appears, and I can’t help but remember when he was just a little kid, and now he’s all grown up.

When they’re gone, I walk around this building that has meant so many very different things to so many people. Such a long and complicated story, a microcosm of this great big world. At this moment, she and I are both a piece of this story.

My daughter returns. On our drive home, I ask why she wondered about my near-death experiences. She shrugs. Just thought I should know, she answers.

I have the odd feeling she’s gathering intel about me.

Appetite.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

Before it’s warm enough, I open the open to our glassed in porch. This porch (nor its upstairs counterpart) isn’t heated. In Vermont’s long winters, we simply close the door and leave the space be. I think of this as a standard New England practice. I store empty canning jars, summer flip-flops, things like old blankets I don’t really want any longer, but nor do I want to cast away.

All day long, doves and cardinals, juncos and chickadees and sparrows, dip and fly around our house. The crocuses struggle upward. I should be cleaning our house, I think, taking a broom to the cobwebby corners before the spring sets in mightily and I’m in the garden as much as possible, happy as I could ever be, the warming soil between my toes.

Now, snow falls intermittently. The robins dig into the earth hungrily.

Consider the tulip,

how it rises every spring

out of the same soil,

which is, of course,

not at all the same soil,

but new.

~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Writing.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I’m working on my laptop in Hardwick’s Front Seat Coffee when a man who I wanted to sell my house to, a few years back, comes up to me. In those days, he and his wife had a few young kids. The house was creative and cool, but in fairly lousy physical shape, and I believed he had the skills to right the rotten places. Life unspun in a different way, a pandemic set in, and that was that.

He’s now read my book about addiction. When we hug, he smells of woodsmoke. These days, he’s boiling sap outside, making syrup for his family.

When my youngest tells me she doesn’t know why anyone would ever write a book, I tell her there’s no reason at all, perhaps, except that it seems impossible NOT to write the book. Maybe all creativity is this way — that we’re driven to do things that otherwise no rational human would. Thank goodness for the madness of art, really.

After we talk about writing and addiction, he tells me he and his wife bought a house I once knew quite well, and we marvel at the interconnection in our little world. I may see him next week, or not for four years. And then our conversation will undoubtedly begin again.

Sun. Rain Moving In.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

These April days, suddenly full with light rushing back. I’m up early, getting things done, putting order into the messiness of my life. Does it make a difference? Who knows? Still, we need to eat. We wash up. Teen does homework. The songbirds and turkey vultures return in force. Now, blue herons fly over my house every day, from the reservoir to the pond near my friend’s house. I think, what if a heron dropped a note or a homemade donut? How cool would that be? But the herons fly on, way cooler than our little human minds.

Here’s a cool poem, though:

Over the Weather – Naomi Shihab Nye, 

We forget about the spaciousness
above the clouds

but it’s up there.The sun’s up there too.

When words we hear don’t fit the day,
when we worry
what we did or didn’t do,
what if we close our eyes,
say any word we love
that makes us feel calm,
slip it into the atmosphere
and rise?

Creamy miles of quiet.
Giant swoop of blue.

Gloves. Rain. A Few Sentences.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

I spend some phone time with a woman who works for Delta Airlines, straightening out a cancelled ticket I need refunded. While she does whatever she needs to do on her end, I lean my head against the glass kitchen door. A light rain falls. I’ve just come in from moving firewood from our stacks to the porch, and my sweatshirt is sprinkled with damp bark shavings. I’ve forgotten my gloves on the back step.

I guess this woman is working at home as the phone line is quiet around her voice. She takes her time, sorting through my request and answering the questions I keep asking about airports and taxes and if she has any suggestions for better flight prices. (Nope.)

We exchange a mutual thanking each other for our patience, and inevitably our conversation tips over into the world’s instability. She tells me about her son, a college student majoring in history, and reminds me that human history is infinitely complicated. Finished, she’s on her way to some other phone call, with someone who might be impatient and angry, or perhaps someone funnier or more eloquent than me.

Through the glass, rain falls steadily on my gloves.

March in Vermont is wet and cold. This morning, stepping out for kindling, I stood in the dark listening to robins singing in the day. I remembered to bring in my sodden gloves.

Next Steps.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

A fierce year for mud in Vermont — the schools send home notices that the busses cannot run. My friends in southern Vermont live in a town where the schools have closed up for a few days. Heck, why not? A basketball game has spread Covid around through the community again, anyway.

Back from my visit to my parents in New Mexico, I work long days, catching up. On the phone with a stranger, I share a little of my trip, and he tells me about his mother. Listening, I stare through the window at the snowflakes fluttering down, little spits of flakes swirling in a gray sky. Then he clears his throat and advises me on my next steps.


Pain Management
by James Silas Rogers

One day, in your forties or fifties,
you will start to think that life is turning
into a long string of small extinctions.
You will feel the word gone rise inside you
and might even say it aloud, quietly, the way
you would say it if the house had been robbed
and, months later, you reached for an item
you never knew was missing, thought had been
in a drawer the whole time: Gone. Add these
to the workaday wrong turns you half-knew
were coming from the start-you know: the shy
girl with trusting eyes with whom
you did not sleep, the dad who let you down—
and you will begin to think that if you started
crying now, you might never be able to stop.
But that doesn’t happen.
What happens instead is you make a cup of tea.

You sit on the front porch, and there you look
at spindly asters on a September afternoon:
flowers with ragged edges that are barely petals,
a color from somewhere down the spectrum
after blue-the same blue of cold skies
in early winter. And behind them,
the deep green of bloomless morning glories.