poetry

Tree Collecting

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I stepped outside the Montpelier Library today and stood for a moment with my face turned up to a shower of cherry tree blossom petals steadily raining down.

As a writer, I collect words I particularly love: myriad and succor, litany and exquisite, constellation and pinwheeling. For years now in my travels around Vermont, I’ve noted particular trees of exceptional grace, like Hardwick’s beauty mark of three silver maples on route 15.

Last weekend, stepping out the back door of my brother’s brewery, I nearly walked into an enormous apple tree covered in pearly blossoms and humming bees. What’s this?  I asked.

Amazing tree, he answered.

What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.

– Issa

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Photo by Molly S.

Being a Child

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Later in the summer, when the gardens are overrun with weeds, and cucumbers and string beans need to be picked from sagging vines, and the days are long with children swimming, and smoke hangs in the air from cooking outside, there’s often a point in the late afternoon when the world seems just a little much: that so-called witching hour mothers of babies know. We’ll move through that hour, through dinner and dishes, and washing up, and the cool leisure of evening comes in.

But now, in the spring, the world is yet at that new place. The weeds are nowhere near knee-high, and the warmth is as welcome as a novel in my hands I want to read.

I imagine this is how childhood should feel.

…And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and
cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams…

– Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

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Montpelier, Vermont

Reasons to Love Vermont

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Yesterday, bees and butterflies busied around the garden while I planted leeks and peas, and today it’s darn near freezing. Reasons to savor Vermont?

A bit of pink pushes through the apple blossom buds. Siberian irises have dislodged stone in our backdoor entryway, and the rose-cheeked children appear to have grown two inches overnight, rivaling the dandelions’ growth. For dinner, we’re eating pork from a friend’s pig and my tart greens and another family’s sheep cheese. We hear coyotes in the morning, waiting for the school bus, and the principal made phone calls for my daughter and her friend to get together “because I like them so much.”

The sweater I knit is sifted with garden dirt, and my hands are stained from weeding. Rain pours; walk around the house, and the sun shines brilliantly. How could you want to be anywhere else?

….Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses? And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper, its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.

– Hayden Carruth, “Testament”

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What’s A Poem Worth?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Yesterday, someone said to me, why would people write a poems if they weren’t going to be paid for them?

That’s a gulch of perception I may never be able to cross. What is a poem worth, anyway?

This morning in Montpelier, I attended an art show, where my daughter had a painting entered. In the opening remarks by Tom Greene, president of Vermont College of Fine Arts, he said creating art widens our experience and makes us more humane. I’m not sure that sentiment would have imprinted on me as an adolescent, but as an adult, far down in the cavernously lonely well of writing a second novel, those words shone like a bright beacon far above, a place I know – a place I continue to heads towards through the arduous work of writing.

What’s art worth? A truer question, perhaps, would be: how unimaginable our world would be without art.

"This is Just to Say"

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

– William Carlos Williams

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artwork by Molly S.

 

Old Receipts & Agriculture

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Unraveling a long trail of receipts today, I realized how poorly that paper trail tells our story. How can an equipment receipt for nine thousand dollars illustrate what those nine thousand dollars really cost our family? How many gallons of syrup I poured, steaming, from a three-gallon stainless steel pail into a giant barrel? With a baby on my back, I was always steeled to keep those tiny fingers from the golden flow of scalding maple syrup. How many of my fellow female sugarmakers, sweaty and beleaguered, have labored in sugarhouses, filled with curling smoke and steam, little ones on their backs?

How can any living, creative endeavor at all be measured in those figures?

This + this = that?

Certainly, our children cannot. A puzzle piece, neither more, nor less.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

– Matthew 6:21

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Photo by Gabriela

Rave On

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

For days, I’ve inhabited the post-root canal world where a sledgehammer banged my jaw. This morning, my young daughter made me coffee and noted, You’re laughing. You must be coming back to life.

This first of May, a steady rain is muddying the woods, jamming the streams near to full, washing clean every bit of green in the garden. Bring it on, I think: frog eggs, emerging salamanders, the ephemerals untangling from the matted forest floor. New England winter is spare, stripped down to straight lines, but spring is all wild, unfurling mightily and messily.

Yesterday, in my broken tooth stupor, I drove to Montpelier to hear poetry. Dede Cummings, of Green Writers Press, read Birches extraordinarily well in that quiet, sun-filled room. Like numerous people, that poem has risen many times in my life, from the first I read it, in 8th grade, to most recently a few summers ago, when my friend Tim Smith had my daughter read it aloud before dinner one gorgeous Colorado evening.

This afternoon, my body unknotting from pain, the neighbors’ boy turning ten this very day, the children enmeshed in their imaginative worlds, our kitchen filled with the fragrance of baking cinnamon, I think, what sheer luck to live in a world where Birches is possible. What sheer luck, this down-pouring day.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

– Robert Frost, “Birches”

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May 1/Woodbury, Vermont