Incarnadine (3 page)

Gabriela-flown-off-to-save-the-donkeys, it’s three hours past dawn. All I’ve done is read the paper and watch the overcast sky gradually lighten. Breaking news from the West: last night it snowed. A man, drunk, tied a yellow inner-tube to his pickup, whistled in his daughter, and drove in circles, dragging her wildly behind …

I know. But to who else can I write of all the things I should not write? I’m afraid I’ve become one of those childless women who reads too much about the deaths of children. Of the local woman who lured the girl to her house, then cut the baby out of her. Of the mother who threw her children off the bridge, not half a mile from where I sleep.

It’s not enough to say the heart wants what it wants. I think of the ravine, the side dark with pines where we lounged through summer days, waiting for something to happen; and of the nights, walking the long way home, the stars so close they seemed to crown us. Once, I asked for your favorite feeling. You said hunger. It felt true then. It was as if we took the bit and bridle from our mouths. From that moment I told myself it was the
not yet
that I wanted, the moving, the toward—

“Be it done unto me,” we used to say, hoping to be called by the right god. Isn’t that why we liked the story of how every two thousand years, a god descends. Leda’s pitiless swan. Then Gabriel announcing the new god and his kingdom of lambs—and now? What slouches

toward us? I think I see annunciations everywhere: blackbirds fall out of the sky, trees lift their feathery branches, a girl in an out-sized yellow halo speeds toward—

I picture her last moments, the pickup pulling faster, pulling rougher, kicking up its tracks in the slush: she’s nestled into that golden circle, sliding toward the edge of the closed-off field—

I am looking at the postcard of
Anunciación
, the one you sent from Córdoba in the spring. I taped it to the refrigerator next to the grocery list because I wanted to think of you, and because I liked its promise: a world where a girl has only to say yes and heaven opens. But now all I see is a bright innertube pillowing behind her head. All I see is a girl being crushed inside a halo that does not save her.

This is what it’s like to be alive without you here: some fall out of the world. I fall back into what I was. Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself.

What I want is what I’ve always wanted. What I want is to be changed.

Sometimes I half think I’m still a girl beside you—stretched out in the ravine or slouched in the church pews, looking up at the angel and girl in the colored glass, the ruby and sapphire bits lit up inside them. Our scene. All we did was slip from their halos—

Which is to say,
mi corazón
, drink up the sunlight you can and stop feeding the good fruit to the goat. Tell me you believe the world is made of more than all its stupid, stubborn, small refusals, that anything, everything is still possible. I wait for word here where the snow is falling, the solitaires are calling, and I am, as always, your M.

And he came to her and said

The Lord is

troubled

in      mind

be afraid Mary

The Holy

will overshadow you

therefore

be

nothing    be impossible

And Mary said

And the angel departed from her

But let us return to the words of the poem.

There is more here than a girl on a trampoline,

more than an up-and-down melancholy

movement. Notice, for instance, how far “girl” appears

from the “brandy-colored branches” of the pine.

And notice how close “girl” appears to “silver bar,”

the one that intermittently flashes in the afternoon light.

How she must long for it, separated only by “looks at.”

Since this is the work of a humanist poet, we can assume

that when she seems to hear a low whistle,

such as her sister described in line two,

she is really only hearing the high-pitched hum

of her own mind as it unwinds.

This suggests that if she had ever really given herself

to the piano or the violin, she would know

what notes were possible, and therefore

how to make a song of herself.

See all those capital Es in the passage, with their lines

like oven racks placed on the middle rung?

The irony is that this should be a domestic scene, but instead

she is forever bouncing on her trampoline

with the wind in her ears. Though her hands

seem to reach toward that metal bar that hangs

just above and before her, we can’t know if she will ever

grasp it. If she does,

she will forfeit her own status as a girl

on a trampoline. Poor girl,

she wants to do what’s right, and she knows

that we are watching. We are told

she is concerned about fair play, but consider

how close “fair play” is to “foreplay.”

She wants it, but she doesn’t know how it goes.

When we direct our gaze at anything,

it collides. She goes on bouncing, and when she tears

the lavender scarf from her neck and says “oh,”

we well might think of “zero.” As it floats down

against the backdrop of the endless, dust-colored clouds,

it could only symbolize something terrible as a lung torn from her

in its idle languor earthward.

It is so-and-so and not the dusty world

who drops.

It is their mother and not the dusty world

who drops them.

Why I imagine her so often

empty-handed

as houseboats’ distant lights

rise and fall on the far ripples—

I do not know.

I know that darkness.

Have stood on that bridge

in the space between the streetlights

dizzy with looking down.

Maybe some darks are deep enough to swallow

what we want them to.

But you can’t have two worlds in your hands

and choose emptiness.

I think that she will never sleep as I sleep,

I who have no so-and-so to throw

or mourn or to let go.

But in that once—with no more

mine, mine, this little so, and that one—

she is what

out-nights me.

So close. So-called

crazy little mother who does not jump.

To save her, they had to cut her brain in two,

had to sever nerves, strip one lobe almost bare.

It left her blind. Still, she has come through.

Today in her new room she sits and chews

the insides of her cheeks. Her gold scarf glares

on her bald head; her eyes are steelier blue.

Where are you as you read this? There’s little news

of war here—something about ambush flares

from TV maps of rivers coursing through

that broken world that soldiers such as you

must now remake. She almost seems to stare

up at the screen. We worry about you.

Not that she’ll know you—but she’ll know you knew

whatever it was she was. So you’ll be air

to her: something borrowed, something blue.

Her mouth hangs quiet, but I don’t think she’s confused.

She has a face she can’t prepare.

She sits and waits with eyes unscrewed.

No need to hurry—but do

come home. Whatever they want of you there,

just finish it. Just do what you must do.

Blind, lobotomized, she waits for you.

The journalist has proof: a photograph of his uncle during the last days of the war, the whole of Florence unfolding behind him, the last standing bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, stretching over the Arno and—you could almost miss it, the point of what is being proved—a small bird on his left shoulder.

Above the rubble, Florence is still Florence. The Duomo is intact, and somewhere in the background, Fra Angelico’s winged creatures still descend through their unearthly light, and Da Vinci’s calm, soft-featured angel approaches the quiet field—

The war is almost over. The bird has made its choice, and it will remain, perched for days, on his shoulder. And though the captain will soon go home to South Africa and then America and live to be an old man, in this once upon a time in Florence, in 1944, a bird chose him—young, handsome, Jewish, alive—as the one place in the world to rest upon.

When Noah had enough of darkness, he sent forth a dove, but the dove found no ground to rest upon and so returned to him. Later he sent her again, and she returned with an olive branch. The next time she did not return, and so Noah walked back into a world where every burnt offering smelled sweet, and God finally took pity on the imaginations he had made.

Some people took the young captain, walking around for days with that bird on his shoulder, to be a saint, a new Saint Francis, and asked him to bless them, which he did, saying “Ace-King-Queen-Jack,” making the sign of the cross.

Saint Good Luck. Saint Young Man who lived through the war. Saint Enough of darkness. Saint Ground for the bird. Saint Say there is a promise here. Saint Infuse the fallen world. Saint How shall this be. Saint Shoulder, Saint Apostrophe, Saint Momentary days. Saint Captain. Saint Covenant of what we cannot say.

(from Senator Robert Byrd and George W. Bush)

The president goes on. The president goes

on and on, though the senator complains

the language of diplomacy is imbued with courtesy …

Who can bear it? I’d rather fasten the words

to a girl, for instance, lounging at the far end of a meadow,

reading her thick book.

I’d rather the president’s words were merely spoken by

a stranger who leans in beside her:

you have a decision to make. Either you rise to this moment or …

She yawns, silver bracelets clicking

as she stretches her arms—

her cerulean sky studded with green, almost golden pears

hanging from honey-colored branches.

In her blue dress, she’s just a bit of that sky,

just a blank bit

fallen into the meadow.

The stranger speaks from the leafy shade.

Show uncertainty and the world will drift

toward tragedy—

Bluster and swagger
, she says,

pulling her scarf to her throat as she turns,

impatient to return, to the half-read page—

He steps toward her.

She pulls her bright scarf tight.

For this
, he says,
everybody prayed.

A lot of people.
He leans on a branch,

his ear bluish in shadow.

If I say everybody, I don’t know if everybody prayed.

I can tell you, a lot prayed.

How still she is.

(Her small lips pursed, her finger still in the pages,

her eyes almost slits as they narrow—)

Nothing matters in this meadow.

There is a girl under pear trees with her book,

and it doesn’t matter what she does or does not promise.

There’s no next scene to hurt her.

Not even the pears fall down.

I want the words to happen here.

God loves you, and I love you
, he says.