poetry

What’s Possible

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My daughter mishears that Vermont’s governor extended the Stay Home, Stay Safe order to May 31, so when I read the order is actually May 15, the extension doesn’t look so bad. In the middle of March, that date would have appeared impossible.

What’s impossible and what’s not has changed enormously in the past few weeks.

In our little world, we walk and we talk. We walk alone. We walk together. The world as we know it might possibly be crumbling around us — 30% unemployment in our state that a month ago had the second lowest in the nation, a Main Street shuttered closed, people I’ve known for years suddenly foreign in masks — but the possible continues.

Every morning — snow or not — birdsong strengthens.

My daughters and I walk out to the ruins of the town pest house, built a hundred years ago in fear of smallpox. There, geese honk clamorously on the lake. From a white pine, two large birds swoop out from the highest branches. My youngest says simply, “Eagles.”

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

— Naomi Shihab Nye, “Famous”

 

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Where We Are

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

One week into April, golden coltsfoot flowers — dime-sized — push up through roadside gravel. Every day and then again in the evening, we walk and explore, searching for frog eggs, for ribbons of green shoots pushing up through the forest floor.

The isolation is hardest on my teenager, who gets up every morning, soldiers away at her schoolwork, goes for a long run.

Implicitly, she understands. There’s no attempt to discuss the end of isolation, of the emptied-out town, of her abandoned high school. In these sunny, radiantly spring days, we progress.

Isolation pulled us down — almost immediately — to what matters, and, really, nothing else. Each day, accomplish some work. Share a meal. Pet our cats. Knit a few rows.

Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

— Philip Booth, “First Lesson”

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Gifts

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

A friend leaves a dozen eggs and a stick on our back porch. She instructs my daughter to put that stick in water.

Doubtfully, my daughter sets the unassuming brown branch in a glass of water on our kitchen table. Really? she asks me.

I tell her it’s a twig from a Daphne bush she’s walked by countless times. When it blooms in that water, you’ll be amazed. I promise her this.

Here’s Adrienne Rich’s poetry for the soul, forwarded from my father.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

 

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Who’s Walking

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

On a midafternoon walk to clear my head, I’m surprised to see so many people in the small neighborhood I pass through on my way to the woods. Generally, it’s just me and the same dog walkers — all a good twenty years older than me, sometimes singly, sometimes in chatty pairs. But couples and families are out — everyone keeping their distance — some folks walking dogs, some simply strolling in the sunlight.

In Vermont, we’re on a Stay Home, Stay Safe mandate — my polite state’s kinder and gentler version of crouch down and shelter-in-place. Later in the day, we hear Vermont schools won’t re-open this year. Even for those who don’t have a student, the message is crystalline: there’s no end in sight. The other side of this disease — for health, for our economy — lies in a chasm.

But we’re not living in a chasm.

Across the street — way more than six feet — strangers and I take our time and pointedly greet each other. Later, during a phone interview for work, I talk with a woman I’ve never met. Far outside of the article’s topic — the homeless in Vermont — we talk and talk, exchanging stories of our daughters, our early motherhood, of these uncertain times. Why not? I thank her profusely for the call, not an email, and we agree to meet in person…. in some future time.

The summer river.
It’s happy to walk across it.
My hands with zori sandal.

— Buson

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August, long ago

This Offering

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

After a day of high school kids reciting poetry, I hold up in the Barre public library. Not far from me, a man unscrews a plastic bottle of sweet tea and mutters to himself. Abruptly, I pause my frantic emailing and wonder if I’m speaking to myself, too.

It’s March and sunny, and the snow has melted — not entirely, but a noticeable amount — since this morning. I’ve left my jacket in the car, as if daring myself to complain about this breeziness-with-a-promise-of-spring in my thin dress.

My head is still filled with poetry, and with the people I’ve met today who, in one way or another, bend their lives around writing and art — people who fashion meaning from the sometimes jagged stuff of this world.

Like libraries, poetry has always been a home to me, filled with the things of the world that both amuse and enchant me — like the man laughing at some secret only he might understand, and myself, staring out the window at a little girl in muddy black boots, digging through the soggy snow with a snapped-off stick, searching for treasure.

I am offering this poem to you,
since I have nothing else to give.
Keep it like a warm coat
when winter comes to cover you,
or like a pair of thick socks
the cold cannot bite through,
I love you…

— Jimmy Santiago Baca

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Barre, Vermont

Visitor, An Ask

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

On a sleety day in rural Woodbury, the bright spot in my afternoon is the woman who walks to the library — a mile or so on slushy backroads because she and her partner have no vehicle. The truck died.

She checks out books, we talk about men and raising kids, the cost of living in Vermont. I’ve been working in rural libraries and schools long enough now that I quickly know who’s hard up versus who’s driving that old Subaru because an old Subaru might make them look a little less affluent. In the sogginess of March, my library visitor is sharp and funny, with an amusing eye for details. Sitting there, in the warm library, after a few hours of relative quiet to catch up on work, I winch, thinking of how carless-ness, unemployment, and rural Vermont can crowd up against a person.

When I leave, I drive her down the road to Hardwick, the two of us, talking, talking. It’s after 5, and while dusk isn’t far off, the day still holds light. She’s pragmatic about her chances for a ride back up the road. I never know. Then, just before she gets out, she asks for two dollars, for him, the boyfriend.

… understanding, and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is the one weapon against the world’s bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped or shaped towards, in the individual, and in the race.

― James Agee

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