Incarnadine

by Mary Szybist

and nose with your mouth.

  Failed inventions, tilt my head back.

  Angels of prostitution and rain,

  you of sheerness and sorrow,

  you who take nothing,

  breathe into me.

  You who have cleansed your lips

  with fire, I do not need to know

  your faces, I do not need you

  to have faces.

  Angels of water insects, let me sleep

  to the sound of your breathing.

  You without lungs, make my chest rise—

  Without you my air tastes

  like nothing. For you

  I hold my breath.

  Entrances and Exits

  In the late afternoon, my friend’s daughter walks into my office looking for snacks. She opens the bottom file drawer to take out a bag of rice cakes and a blue carton of rice milk that comes with its own straw. I have been looking at a book of paintings by Duccio. Olivia eats. Bits of puffed rice fall to the carpet.

  A few hours ago, the 76-year-old woman, missing for two weeks in the wilderness, was found alive at the bottom of a canyon. The men who found her credit ravens. They noticed ravens circling—

  Duccio’s Annunciation sits open on my desk. The slender angel (dark, green-tipped wings folded behind him) reaches his right hand towards the girl; a vase of lilies sits behind them. But the white dots above the vase don’t look like lilies. They look like the bits of puffed rice scattered under my desk. They look like the white fleck at the top of the painting that means both spirit and bird.

  Olivia, who is six, picks up the wooden kaleidoscope from my desk and, holding it to her eye, turns it to watch the patterns honeycomb, the colors tumble and change—

  Today is the 6th of September. In six days, Russia will hold a day of conception: couples will be given time off from work to procreate, and those who give birth on Russia’s national day will receive money, cars, refrigerators, and other prizes.

  A six-hour drive from where I sit, deep in the Wallowa Mountains, the woman spent at least six days drifting in and out of consciousness, listening to the swellings of wind, the howls of coyotes, the shaggy-throated ravens—

  I turn on the radio. Because he died this morning, Pavarotti’s immoderate, unnatural Cs ring out. He said that, singing these notes, he was seized by an animal sensation so intense he would almost lose consciousness.

  Duccio’s subject is God’s entrance into time: time meaning history, meaning a body.

  No one knows how the woman survived in her light clothes, what she ate and drank, or what she thought when she looked up into the unkindness of ravens, their loops, their green and purple iridescence flashing—

  I think of honeybees. For months, whole colonies have been disappearing from their hives. Where are the bodies? Some blame droughts. Too few flowers, they say: too little nectar.

  Consider the ravens. They neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. (Luke 12:24)

  The men never saw the ravens—just heard their deep caw, caw circling.

  Olivia and I look down on Duccio’s scene. I point to the angel’s closed lips; she points to his dark wings.

  The blue container of rice milk fits loosely into Olivia’s hand the same way the book fits into the hand of Duccio’s Mary. She punches a hole in the top and, until it is empty, Olivia drinks.

  It Is Pretty to Think

  Long after the Desert and Donkey

  (Gabriel to Mary)

  And of what there would be no end

  —it came quickly.

  The wind runs loose, the air churns over us.

  No one remembers.

  But I remember, under the elm’s cool awning,

  watching you watch the clouds.

  Afternoons passed like afternoons,

  and I loved how dull you were.

  Given a bit of bark or the buzz

  of a bright green fly, you’d smile

  for hours. Sweet child, you’d go to anyone.

  You had no preferences.

  I remember the first time coming toward you,

  how solid you looked, sitting and twisting

  your dark hair against your neck.

  But you were not solid.

  From the first moment, when you breathed

  on my single lily, I saw

  where you felt it.

  From then on, I wanted to bend low and close

  to the curves of your ear.

  There were so many things I wanted to tell you.

  Or rather,

  I wished to have things that I wanted to tell you.

  What a thing, to be with you and have

  no words for it. What a thing,

  to be outcast like that.

  And then everything unfastened.

  It was like something was always dissolving

  inside you—

  Already it’s hard to remember

  how you used to comb your hair or how you

  tilted your broad face in green shade.

  Now what seas, what meanings

  can I place in you?

  Each night, I see you by the window—

  sometimes pressing your lips against a pear

  you do not eat. Each night,

  I see where you feel it:

  where there are no mysteries.

  To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary

  All morning I’ve thought of you feeding donkeys in the Spanish sun—Donkey Petra, old and full of cancer. Blind Ruby who, you say, loves carrots and takes a long time to eat them. Silver the beautiful horse with the sunken spine who was ridden too young for too long and then abandoned. And the head-butting goat who turned down your delicious kiwi so afterward you wondered why you hadn’t eaten it.

  Here I feed only the unimpressed cats who go out in search of something better. Outside, the solitaires are singing their metallic songs, warning off other birds. Having to come down from the mountain this time of year just to pick at the picked-over trees must craze them a little. I can hear it in their shrill, emphatic notes, a kind of no, no in the undertone. With each one, it is like my body blinks—which, from a distance, must look like flickering.

  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 Córdob
a 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.

  Notes on a 39-Year-Old Body

  Most internal organs jiggle and glow and are rosy pink. The ovary is dull and gray…. It is scarred and pitted, for each cycle of ovulation leaves behind a white blemish where an egg follicle has been emptied of its contents. The older the woman, the more scarred her pair of ovaries will be.

  —NATALIE ANGIER, WOMAN: AN INTIMATE GEOGRAPHY

  She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress.

  — HENRY JAMES, THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

  Annunciation under Erasure

  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

  Close Reading

  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.

  So-and-So Descending from the Bridge

  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.

  I Send News: She Has Survived the Tumor after All

  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.

  Another True Story

  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 e
very 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.

  Annunciation in Byrd and Bush

  (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.