poetry

Chance Encounter

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Walking home from the library last night, I met a friend on the way, who walked with me up the hill, through the cemetery, and into our back yard, the half moon overhead watchful.

My friend’s decades-long job had recently ended, and she was painting the cabinets beneath the kitchen sink. Laughing, we exchanged painting stories, and I confessed my intention to turn the downstairs of my house into sunflower hues.

Over my barn, not far above the wooded horizon, hazy red Mars kept company with the pearly moon. My 13-year-old, walking barefoot over the dewy grass, came to say hello and remarked how near the planet seemed.

Oh mysteries of twilight, when the impossible seems possible.

Holding the umbrella,
The mother is behind.
The autumn rain.

— Nakamura Teijo

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Small Thing

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

While my 13-year-old chatted with a woman in an office today, I leaned back, yawning, thinking about another cup of coffee.

The woman’s low leather boots were worn at the heels. She was well-dressed with a silk blouse and gray slacks, in a professional position, and I assume lack of money was not the reason for her worn shoes. Love, likely. The boots probably fit her well, and she loved them.

How hard we can wear the things — and the people — we love most. Like this bowl, broken at the edge, that I keep filling. Fresh salsa — peppers, tomatoes, onions, salt.

There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one can agree what they are.

~Somerset Maugham

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Omen

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Running on the trails behind the high school today, a owl swoops through the woods, heads along the path, and then veers rapidly into the canopy. I run after him, but he’s gone.

Omen, clearly. But of what?

My luck to see this winged beauty?

Or a warning to keep my eyes open? Or just an owl searching for supper? I can look back on my life now and see all kinds of omens I missed — or blatantly ignored — but maybe, I keep thinking, those were merely owls, then, too….

Then, sometime during the fourth year, the omens will abandon you, because you’ve stopped listening to them.

— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

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Cat’s Heart

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

My daughter’s cat lies on the gray-painted floor at the top of the stairs, just outside her room, looking in. She’s away with friends in Maine. Over email, her sister and I see pictures of her swimming in a lake and the ocean — all that great blue and green wilderness around her 13-year-old self.

Her cat, of course, knows nothing of this, but simply lies at the threshold to her door, waiting for her return.

This morning, the rain’s returned, a great downpour. In the garden, yesterday, I pulled out handfuls of dead lily leaves, the broken and blackened remainders of lupine stems. Middle of August, and school and soccer start soon. The evenings come earlier, and the Black-eyed Susans burst brightly along the weedy roadsides.

Things do not change; we change.

— Thoreau

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After Midnight

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Rain falls in the night. The cats press at the window screen, curious, wakeful in their quiet way.

In this post-midnight hour, I close my library book about Trump and deceit — how language is both truth and weapon. From the stack of books donated to my library, I pull a collection of essays.

While the rain continues to fall lightly — and I think of my thirsty garden drinking, drinking, the trees with their copious roots and the innumerable blades of grass — a domestic black-and-white-and-coffee-colored tiger curls at my feet while I read about a liver transplant.

We are made of the dust of old stars, our grade-school teacher told us; we are made of lives and sediment and the mulch of life. But I was also made of something rescued from the graveyard…. you can’t quite forget the how it felt to lie in the close darkness of that grave; you can’t forget the acrid smell of the earth or the stink of the moldering grave clothes, especially now that you know, as you never did before, that you’re headed back to the grave again, as is everyone, and you know this with a clarity you cherish and despise.

— Richard McCann, The Resurrectionist

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Antidote

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A photograph of my daughter and her friend is on a Good Citizen poster.

What the heck does that mean, she asks? Who’s a good citizen?

I drag up my standard answers: that history matters, that good fortune doesn’t equate with good character, that our actions affect others, whether we see — or want to see — this or not.

Later, I realize I should add this in: read and write poetry.

Poems build our capacity for imaginative thinking, create a tolerance for ambiguity, and foster an appreciation for the role of the unknown in human life. From such compact structures of language, from so few poems, so much can be reinforced that is currently at risk in our culture.

— Tony Hoagland, Twenty Poems That Could Save America

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