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berries not by the work of our hands, berries not by the work of our fingers.
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Incarnadine
Also by Mary Szybist
Granted
INCARNADINE
POEMS
Mary Szybist
GRAYWOLF PRESS
Copyright © 2013 by Mary Szybist
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-635-4
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-330-8
4 6 8 9 7 5 3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012953979
Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design
Cover art: Botticelli, Sandro (1444–1510). Annunciation. Tempera on wood, 150 × 156 cm. Inv. 1608. Uffizi, Florence, Italy. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.
FOR Jerry Harp
Cor ad cor loquitur
Contents
The Troubadours Etc.
Annunciation (from the grass beneath them)
Conversion Figure
Annunciation in Nabokov and Starr
Heroine as She Turns to Face Me
Update on Mary
Hail
Annunciation as Fender’s Blue Butterfly with Kincaid’s Lupine
Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle
Invitation
Entrances and Exits
It Is Pretty to Think
Long after the Desert and Donkey
To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary
Notes on a 39-Year-Old Body
Annunciation under Erasure
Close Reading
So-and-So Descending from the Bridge
I Send News: She Has Survived the Tumor after All
Another True Story
Annunciation in Byrd and Bush
On a Spring Day in Baltimore, the Art Teacher Asks the Class to Draw Flowers
Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc
To the Dove within the Stone
Holy
How (Not) to Speak of God
Yet Not Consumed
On Wanting to Tell [ ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes
Annunciation in Play
Too Many Pigeons to Count and One Dove
The Cathars Etc.
To You Again
Annunciation: Eve to Ave
Annunciation Overheard from the Kitchen
Night Shifts at the Group Home
Happy Ideas
Annunciation as Right Whale with Kelp Gulls
Here, There Are Blueberries
Do Not Desire Me, Imagine Me
Insertion of Meadow with Flowers
Knocking or Nothing
The Lushness of It
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
—SIMONE WEIL, GRAVITY AND GRACE
Repose had again incarnadined her cheeks.
—THOMAS HARDY, FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
The Troubadours Etc.
Just for this evening, let’s not mock them.
Not their curtsies or cross-garters
or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens
promising, promising.
At least they had ideas about love.
All day we’ve driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads
through metal contraptions to eat.
We’ve followed West 84, and what else?
Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields,
yellowing flowering shrubs.
Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them,
the violet underneath of clouds.
Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up:
there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled—
darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound
with the thunder of their wings.
After a while, it must have seemed that they followed
not instinct or pattern but only
one another.
When they stopped, Audubon observed,
they broke the limbs of stout trees by the weight of the numbers.
And when we stop we’ll follow—what?
Our hearts?
The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love
only through miracle,
but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.
Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you.
Think of me in the garden, humming
quietly to myself in my blue dress,
a blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms,
though cloudless.
At what point is something gone completely?
The last of the sunlight is disappearing
even as it swells—
Just for this evening, won’t you put me before you
until I’m far enough away you can
believe in me?
Then try, try to come closer—
my wonderful and less than.
Annunciation (from the grass beneath them)
how many moments did it hover before we felt
it was like nothing else, it was not bird
light as a mosquito, the aroma of walnut husks
while the girl’s knees pressed into us
every spear of us rising, sunlit and coarse
the wild bees murmuring through
what did you feel when it was almost upon us when
even the shadows her chin made
never touched but reached just past
the crushed mint, the clover clustered between us
how cool would you say it was
still cool from the clouds
how itchy the air
the girl tilted and lurched and then
we rose up to it, held ourselves tight
when it skimmed just the tips of our blades
didn’t you feel softened
no, not even its flickering trembled
Conversion Figure
I spent a long time falling
toward your slender, tremulous face—
a long time slipping through stars
as they shattered, through sticky clouds
with no confetti in them.
I fell toward earth’s stony colors
until they brightened, until I could see
the green and white stripes of party umbrellas
propped on your daisied lawn.
From above, you looked small
as an afterthought, something lightly brushed in.
Beside you, blush-pink plates
served up their pillowy cupcakes, and your rosy hems
swirled round your dark head—
I fell and fell.
I fell toward the pulse in your thighs,
toward the cool flamingo of your slip
fluttering past your knees—
Out of God’s mouth I fell
like a piece of ripe fruit
toward your deepening shadow.
Girl on the lawn without sleeves, knees bare even of lotion,
time now to strip away everything
you try to think about yourself.
Put down your little dog.
Stop licking the cake from your fingers.
Before today, what darkness
did you let into your flesh? What stillness
did you cast into the soil?
Lift up your head.
Time to make your own sorrow.
Time to unbrighten and discard
even your slenderness.
Annunciation in Nabokov and Starr
(from The Starr Report and Nabokov’s Lolita)
I simply can’t tell you how gentle, how touching she was.
I knocked, and she opened the door.
She was holding her hem in her hands.
I simply can’t tell you how gentle, how calm she was
during her cooperation. In the windowless hallway,
I bent toward her.
She was quiet as a cloud.
She touched her mouth with her damp-smelling hand.
There was no lake behind us, no arbor in flame-flower.
There was a stone wall the dull white of vague orchards in bloom.
When she stood up to gather the almost erasable
scents into the damp folds
of her blue dress—
When she walked through the Rose Garden,
its heavy, dove-gray air,
dizzy with something unbreathable—
There was something soft and moist about her,
a dare, a rage, an intolerable tenderness.
How could I have known
what the sky would do? It was awful to watch
its bright shapes churn and zero
through her, knowing
her body looked like anyone’s body
paused at the edge of the garden.
Heroine as She Turns to Face Me
Just before the curtain closes, she turns
toward me, loosening
her gauzy veil & bright hair—
This, she seems to say, this
to create scene, the pure sweep of it,
this to give in, feel the lushness,
this & just a little theatrical lighting
& you, too, can be happy,
she’s sure of it—
It’s as if I cut her heart-whole from the sky,
rag & twist & tongue & the now terrible speed
of her turning
toward me like the spirit
I meant to portray, indefatigable—
see how bravely she turns, how exactly true to the turning,
& in the turning
most herself,
as she arranges herself for the exit
withholding nothing, unraveling
the light in her hair as her face
her bright, unapproachable face
says only that
whatever the next scene is,
she will fill it.
Update on Mary
Mary always thinks that as soon as she gets a few more things done and finishes the dishes, she will open herself to God.
At the gym Mary watches shows about how she should dress herself, so each morning she tries on several combinations of skirts and heels before retreating to her waterproof boots. This takes a long time, so Mary is busy.
Mary can often be observed folding the laundry or watering the plants. It is only when she has a simple, repetitive task that her life feels orderly, and she feels that she is not going to die before she is supposed to die.
Mary wonders if she would be a better person if she did not buy so many almond cookies and pink macaroons.
When people say “Mary,” Mary still thinks Holy Virgin! Holy Heavenly Mother! But Mary knows she is not any of those things.
Mary worries about not having enough words in her head.
Mary fills her cupboards with many kinds of teas so that she can select from their pastel labels according to her mood: Tuscan Pear, Earl Grey Lavender, Cherry Rose Green. But Mary likes only plain red tea and drinks it from morning to night.
Mary has too many silver earrings and likes to sort them in the compartments of her drawer.
Someday Mary would like to think about herself, but she’s not yet sure what it means to think, and she’s even more confused about herself.
It is not uncommon to find Mary falling asleep on her yoga mat when she has barely begun to stretch.
Mary sometimes closes her eyes and tries to imagine herself as a door swung open. But it is easier to imagine pink macaroons—
Mary likes the solemn titles on her husband’s thick books. She feels content and sleepy when he reads them beside her at night—The Works of Saint Augustine, Critique of Judgment, Paradigm Change in Theology—but she does not want to read them.
Mary secretly thinks she is pretty and therefore deserves to be loved.
Mary tells herself that if only she could have a child she could carry around like an extra lung, the emptiness inside her would stop gnawing.
It’s hard to tell if she believes this.
Mary believes she is a sincere and serious person, but she does not even try to pray.
Some afternoons Mary pretends to read a book, but mostly she watches the patterns of sunlight through the curtains.
On those afternoons, she’s like a child who has run out of things to think about.
Mary likes to go out and sit in the yard. If she let herself, she’d stare at the sky all day.
The most interesting things to her are clouds. See, she watches them even by moonlight. Tonight, until bedtime, we can let her have those.
Hail
Mary who mattered to me, gone or asleep
among fruits, spilled
in ash, in dust, I did not
leave you. Even now I can’t keep from
composing you, limbs and blue cloak
and soft hands. I sleep to the sound
of your name, I say there is no Mary
except the word Mary, no trace
on the dust of my pillowslip. I only
dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets,
of honeybees above you
murmuring into a crown. Antique queen,
the night dreams on: here are the pears
I have washed for you, here the heavy-winged doves,
asleep by the hyacinths. Here I am,
having bathed carefully in the syllables
of your name, in the air and the sea of them, the sharp scent
of their sea foam. What is the matter with me?
Mary, what word, what dust
can I look behind? I carried you a long way
into my mirror, believing you would carry me
back out. Mary, I am still
for you, I am still a numbness for you.
Annunciation as Fender’s Blue Butterfly with Kincaid’s Lupine
The endangered Fender’s blue butterfly associates, not with common lupines, but with the very rare Kincaid’s lupine.
—NATIVE PLANT SOCIETY OF OREGON
But if I were this thing,
my mind a thousand times smaller than my wings,
if my fluorescent blue flutter
finally stumbled
into the soft
aqua throats of the blossoms,
if I lost my hunger
for anything else—
I’d do the same. I’d fasten myself
to the touch of the flower.
So what if the milky rims of my wings
no longer stupefied
the sky? If I could
bind myself to this moment, to the slow
snare of its scent,
what would it matter if I became
just the flutter of page
in a text someone turns
to examine me
in the wrong color?
Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle
Are you sure this blue is the same as the
blue over there? This wall’s like the
bottom of a pool, its
color I mean. I need a
darker two-piece this summer, the kind with
elastic at the waist so it actually
fits. I can’t
find her hands. Where does this gold
go? It’s like the angel’s giving
her a little piece of honeycomb to eat.
I don’t see why God doesn’t
just come down and
kiss her himself. This is the red of that
lipstick we saw at the
mall. This piece of her
neck could fit into the light part
of the sky. I think this is a
piece of water. What kind of
queen? You mean
right here? And are we supposed to believe
she can suddenly
talk angel? Who thought this stuff
up? I wish I had a
velvet bikini. That flower’s the color of the
veins in my grandmother’s hands. I
wish we could
walk into that garden and pick an
X-ray to float on.
Yeah. I do too. I’d say a
zillion yeses to anyone for that.
Invitation
If I can believe in air, I can believe
in the angels of air.
Angels, come breathe with me.
Angel of abortion, angel of alchemy,
angels of barrenness and bliss,
exhale closer. Let me feel
your breath on my teeth—
I call to you, angels of embryos,
earthquakes, you of forgetfulness—
Angels of infection, cover my mouth