poetry

Memory, Body

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

In the middle of the night, I’m awake thinking of myself, years ago at 30, standing at the roundabout in Montpelier between Main Street and Route 12, baby on my back, trying to figure out where my life—where our lives—would go. It was October then, 1999, and the news amped Y2K fears.

Every time I walk along that section of street in Vermont’s capital city, I think of that cold autumn’s crepuscular hour, as if I pass through its shadow again. The notion of linear time is supercilious. Walking with a friend in the Hardwick town forest, we talk about our 13-year-old daughters. Both of us mothers now, long past adolescence—and yet, we’re both 13. Our conversation crackles with memory.

That baby on my back is now 20. No one but myself will ever remember that evening. And yet, there it is: always with me.

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted,” for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each others’ sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

— Adrienne Rich

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Februrary sunbathing….

Go Fly a Kite

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Friday night finds me unexpectedly alone in the house—one daughter at a basketball game and the other working—just myself and the two cats. The cat who appreciates personal space I leave alone in his cardboard box, and the other cat lies on my legs while I read on the couch.

I’m reading the long-listed for the Booker Prize graphic novel Sabrina. By the end of it, I’m so disturbed, I’m in an even funkier, end-of-the-week mood.

Here’s my main goal for the weekend: go out into the wind.

As a kid, we flew kites. On the beach and on the fields up the street and definitely on a few picnics, too.

There’s nothing quite like the tug of a well-flying kite in your hand. Maybe we won’t fly a kite this weekend, but I’m going to sweep the kitchen floor and maybe even mop, and then head out into this whipping wind, let the clutter of my internal chatter drift, and step into the roar of mighty spring.

The spring breeze.
Being pulled by a cow
To the Zenkoji temple.

— Issa

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Broken Down, Back on the Road

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Before dawn, a crescent moon greets me silently through my kitchen window, hanging low in the sky, with glittering Venus and Jupiter. I stand there for a moment, imprinting that soundless beauty in my mind, like a talisman I might carry through the day. I leave in the dark, listening to VPR and watching the car’s thermometer dip down, down, as I drive up through the Woodbury Gulf. 14 below zero.

Not all that much later, I’m out of my car in Waterbury, pouring coolant into my overheating car, the water pump shot. It’s so cold the air is misty. I limp along into Waterbury, where I cluster with the other folks in the waiting room, drinking terrible K-cup coffee.

I’m nosy—I completely own up to this—as I “overlook” the woman’s laptop beside me as she books a hotel room in Charlotte. She wears enviably warm and stylish black leather boots. Beside me, I realize a man is somewhat surreptitiously scrutinizing my notebook, but I’m darned sure he can’t read my bad handwriting. Heck, I can hardly read it, and I’m the author. His phone rings, and I actually wonder if he’s speaking Greek. So much for my knowledge of other languages.

It’s that kind of day. By 11:30am, I’m back on the Interstate again—traffic is oddly light at that time—but the day seems basically shot. How much has already happened, and how much more lies ahead.

There’s the moon and those heavenly bodies, though. How much paler the day would have been, without those beauties.

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While I’m at work, the kids send me a photo of their cat’s displeasure with their afternoon snack.

Cobweb Sweeping

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

When my daughters suggest a Saturday afternoon skiing with me, I’m immersed in that eternal list of must do, must do, as if the universe’s spin depended on my crossing out whatever rises next on the list.

Maybe I’m simply utterly annoyed at another half day of work I’ll lose again next week — no doubt in vain — seeking child support. But goodness, both teenagers want to cross country ski with me. The younger girl skies ahead, and then loops back. We ski through the woods and over streams, and then a long slow uphill through open fields. We can see all the way to Creek Road, where the bare branches of roadside maples link the sky to the snow-covered earth. Stripping off hats, sweaty, I remember again why I love Vermont’s stark and signified winter beauty, why I love Vermont’s patchwork of small farm and wild forest, why I was certain at 18 that Vermont was the place for me to live.

We ski all afternoon, passing by where our friends once lived, old farmhouse of such merriment. My older daughter talks and talks, about work and about love. At home, we cook dinner together, our cheeks beaming red with cold and happiness.

Pare Everything Down to Almost Nothing

then cut the rest,
and you’ve got
the poem
I’m trying to write.

— David Budbill

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Photo by Molly S.

Studded Snows

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 5 Comments

What’s the one thing that makes Vermont winters survivable? Friends? Laughter? Knitting? A chicken roasting in the oven? Nope: snow tires.

Driving to Burlington on a snowy Sunday morning to interview a young poet, I kept thinking, At least I bought new snow tires. When my daughter disappears in the darkness to work, I think, I’m so glad I shelled out for those tires.

On my way home through the Calais back roads, I pull over at the town hall, a beautiful and somewhat mysterious building to me — why is it here? what’s the history that’s now disappeared around this building? I’ve been listening to NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me and laughing so hard I’m actually crying.

Outside my little Toyota, I’m immediately reminded of winter’s enchanting beauty, the bit of wind on my cheeks and the snowflakes in my eyelashes. Sunday afternoon, and no one’s out and about, save for one  grownup far down the road, walking a dog. Leaving my car at the roadside, I walk down to the meeting house and stand there, staring up at the steeple in the gauzy snow, listening. Then I put those snow tires to use again.

Winter seclusion —
Listening, that evening,
To the rain in the mountain.

— Issa

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