poetry

Hey, Kid!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The other evening I walked by a kid in shorts and a t-shirt crouched down in the mess of road construction on Main Street. What the heck? He was about seven-years-old or so, his hands on a thick stake with a blue triangle flag hammered into the bulldozed dirt.

The little boy was so serious that I stopped and looked back at him. Evening, the workers had long since quit, and no one was around except for cars and pickups on the road. The boy snapped off the stake, immediately put it over his shoulder, and walked down the road quickly.

Slow-thinking perhaps, I didn’t realize what the child was up to, until I saw his yet-serious face glance over his shoulder at the blue flag, and then his fingers came back and brushed the triangle, lightly, without lessening his speed.

The kid was working, doing serious stuff, holding up the veritable imaginative life of the village. So intent he never smiled, he hurried across the street and disappeared around a building, out of my sight.

When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions – such as merit, such as past, present, and future – our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

– Peter Matthiessen

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Summer girl

Midsummer Marveling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In these long July evenings, the children stay up late around the firepit, roasting ridiculously large marshmallows, burning the sugary outsides while the innards remain in their bizarre, uncooked marshmallow state. As the dew descends, I gather swimsuits, a sandal beside the trampoline, a library book.

Early mornings, the light already risen like an energetic lover, I wake and think, It’s still July.

This season, too, will pass. Snow will fall densely, the moon rise over the pristinely ice-shrouded field; our eyes will blink against frost.

All that is exquisitely lovely.

But it’s July now…. and we’re Julying.

…In his torn voice Crow is forever
giving advice. Last week, after fighting
with you, Crow counseled me, said to pick
a cup of raspberries, to lay them in a circle
atop your bowl of cereal.

Todd Davis, from “Crow Counsels Me in the Ways of Love” in In the Kingdom of the Ditch
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The Target

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Like many parents, I’m sure, much of my life seems a scramble between work and, honestly, everything else; then yesterday afternoon I picked up my daughter at camp, ate BBQ and lettuce so fresh it had grains of sand on one leaf, and realized, Here’s a bit of normalcy. Run by Fish and Wildlife, the camp’s youthful crew exuded energy, health, and merriment. Suntanned and happy, my daughter sat at a picnic table between an old friend and a new friend.

Here’s my goal for the gorgeous emerald Vermont July and August: remember, this is the only summer this kid will be twelve. Earn enough money, do my work – yes, of course – but much as this girl loved camp, she was happy to come home, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes….

From (where else?) Dylan Thomas’s incomparable “Fern Hill”

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Buck Lake, Woodbury, Vermont

 

Oh, Joy!

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Coltsfoot sighting today: a whole wide hillside of the gorgeous tiny blossoms. This Good Friday emanates the radiance of these persistent blossoms. In Montpelier, everyone is smiling. I buy too much Easter candy, chatting with the proprietor at Delish about taxes.

On the street, I see young mothers everywhere, babes cradled in arms, or kicking their tiny heels in strollers. A young man intently mows the State House lawn. I stand on the wide porch of The Pavilion, a warm wind tugging hair into my mouth, as I plot changes in my life.

An old woman walks down the street with two shirtless teenage boys. All three lick ice cream cones.

Collective good will. Collective promise of spring in all her tender green beauty.

The old man
cutting barley–
bent like a sickle.

– Yosa Buson

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Birds of Prey, And Us Non-Birds

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night at our little local library, a high school student told his story of visiting a falconer. The falcons, he said, have one primal force: to eat. He described feathered creatures who will sit for hours, waiting for a mouse to appear – almost sure prey at a hole – rather than using calories to fly randomly and seek the unknown.

The world of training these regal birds, the teenager relayed, centers on one primary object: a morsel of London broil on a leather gauntlet. That is so not the human way. Perhaps in hunter-gatherer days, single-minded patience and determination dictated human action, but it’s nearly impossible for me to imagine when the human terrain of desire – for food beyond sustenance, sweet, salty, and spicy; for silk and myriad dyed colors for fashion; for adulation on a small and great scale; for the comfort of coupling in bed, complicated or not – hasn’t constantly jumbled up civilization.

Aggravating, infuriating at times, this world I inhabit, and yet this morning, waking in the dark with a child murmuring in her sleep near me, what a wondrous world, too. Not far from my desk, a mouse scurries in and out of its tiny hole, busy with its own rodent variation of London broil. More generous this rainy morning, I think, Go about, little one.

Autumn Haiku

Even from my front porch
the rusted sewing machine
yearns for golden thread.

– Warren Falcon

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Woodbury, Vermont

Writing Lists

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

At a meeting recently, the person beside me pulled out a handwritten list and flipped it over a few times, reading. Because I’m me, I naturally tried to read that list. In between crossed out items, I read fold laundry.

A serious list-writer myself, that particular chore has appeared numerous times on my lists, along with buy cooking oil and go to dump. Isn’t a list a written map, in some ways, of who we are? Years ago, in between buy toilet paper and teach Molly to read, I had  find publisher for novel. I’ve now crossed that item off my list, and now, simply, on every list I begin is write every day. While lists are inherently interesting, what may be more interesting is what doesn’t make lists. For years, while my marriage was disintegrating, I likely should have written either fix this or file divorce papers.

At this point, in my forties, I’d far prefer my lists to read write and fold laundry. I would have scoffed at that simple normalcy in my twenties, but now – a little more steady everydayness goes a very long way. That’s one more reason to savor homemade pickles – although here I am, writing, among veritable mounds of unfolded laundry…..

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

– Alice Walker

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Woodbury, Vermont