Incarnadine
Authors: Mary Szybist
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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
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.
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
Annunciation (from the grass beneath them)
Annunciation in
Nabokov
and
Starr
Heroine as She Turns to Face Me
Annunciation as Fender’s Blue Butterfly with Kincaid’s Lupine
Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle
Long after the Desert and Donkey
To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary
So-and-So Descending from the Bridge
I Send News: She Has Survived the Tumor after All
On a Spring Day in Baltimore, the Art Teacher Asks the Class to Draw Flowers
On Wanting to Tell [ ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes
Too Many Pigeons to Count and One Dove
Annunciation Overheard from the Kitchen
Night Shifts at the Group Home
Annunciation as Right Whale with Kelp Gulls
Insertion of Meadow with Flowers
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Just before the curtain closes, she turns
toward me, loosening
her gauzy veil & bright hair—