Left the Shoes on the Back Porch…

June 11, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

After a day of brilliant sunshine, rain moves in during the night. My daughters’ cats, in the screened windows, wake me with their hungry mewing, against the background chorus of steady rainfall and birdsong.

Arriving home from work, I see my daughters have been swimming that afternoon, their hair in damp lanks around their shoulders.

As if in an instant, summer has unrolled in Vermont — verdant and colorful — while simultaneously the woods darken mysteriously with foliage.

90 days, poet David Budbill wrote. Frost-freeze — maybe — for 90 days in Vermont. Hallelujah.

Sparrow singing–
its tiny mouth
open.

— Buson

2,000 Miles, a Handful of Hours

June 9, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

What a strange, odd thing to travel 2,000 miles over the earth’s curve, all in the piece of one day. We began in that incredibly quiet hour between 1 and 2 a..m., standing in my parents’ kitchen, drinking coffee with the tenor of silliness that early hour deserves.

For a just a moment we stood outside in the New Mexico rural dark, under the unsurpassable beauty of the constellations and the Milky Way’s arch, and then our contemporary travels began by Subaru, by shuttle, by sandals running through an airport, by plane and by Toyota, and finally home to bare feet in the garden, where I ate tart radishes.

Modern miracles, all of this locomotion. But at the journey’s end was the greater wonder: our rows of lilacs — lavender and deep violet, pearly double-blossoms — all in bloom, ineffably scented — breathe in, breathe in — humming with pollinators, quietly going about their business.

You are brighter than apples,

Sweeter than tulips,

You are the great flood of our souls

Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts,

You are the smell of all Summers…

From Amy Lowell’s Lilacs

How Does Your Garden Grow?

June 4, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

June is the season of opened earth in Vermont. Black soil, sandy loam, gray clay.

My daughters keep to the edges of my somewhat maniacal gardening — their interests along the photography and mowing aspects.

What grows and thrives and why? How can these bits of velvet petals emerge from stony soil, gnawed by earthworms and grubs? The scent of lilacs from gray branch, rain water, glacial till?

Perhaps this is the most curious aspect of spring — the mystery of growth — and perhaps why I’m content to let my daughters consciously (and unconsciously) busy themselves at their own lives, their hands not yet sunk in the soil, not yet at the place in their lives of nurture, weed, tend, their leaves and branches still spreading.

Try to plant
As for a child.
A little wild cherry tree.

— Basho

The Daughters’ Truths

May 30, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

My nearly 14-year-old daughter plays country music in the car, edgily looking at me from the side of her eyes. The girls’ father sends them a text that he honors their truths. What’s anyone’s truth, anyway, I wonder, as I listen to my daughters.

Maybe dreaming with her best friend about learning to drive, messing around on the water with kayaks and a pizza-shaped floatie, adoration of her two cats. A reticent girl with big dreams.

That’s all truth, as I much I know it. Not words, not ideas, not ideology — only what’s around us, what we’re living, how this reticent girl with big dreams is growing.

Let life be like music.

— Langston Hughes

Lying on the Grass…

May 23, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

After a less-than-harmonious game of croquet, I lie back on the grass. Overhead, a rainbow. All this day, toiling away at things that may or may not matter…. and in this pause, a rainbow? Makes me wonder what else I missed.

Such a moon—
the thief
pauses to sing.

— Buson

Brief Water Interlude

May 19, 2019 / Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the rain, the girls pushed the kayaks into the water. The wind blew up, and I sat on the shore, my plan to lie on the grass and read foiled. Later, I went down to the end of the pond and sat at the edge while the rain washed through and sunlight sprinkled the water. The inky black head of a loon surfaced.

The girls paddled over to me, laughing. A heron cut across the cloudy sky. The peepers chorused busily. A boy appeared with his fishing pole.

This cold May: every day, a little more green, a bit more Technicolor, antidote to That Winter…

…here deep in the mountain
everywhere the sound of the pines.

— Ryōkan

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

poetry