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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—

  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