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Authors: Mary Szybist

Incarnadine

BOOK: Incarnadine
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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,

lounging sheep, telephone wires,

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 enter yourself.

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—

BOOK: Incarnadine
10.89Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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