Incarnadine Quotes

“Without you my air tastes like nothing. For you I hold my breath.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“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.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“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?”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“[...] and I needed relief from myself.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“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.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“Here, There Are Blueberries

When I see the bright clouds, a sky empty of moon and stars,
I wonder what I am, that anyone should note me.

Here there are blueberries, what should I fear?
Here there is bread in thick slices, of whom should I be afraid?

Under the swelling clouds, we spread our blankets.
Here in this meadow, we open our baskets

to unpack blueberries, whole bowls of them,
berries not by the work of our hands, berries not by the work of our fingers.

What taste the bright world has, whole fields
without wires, the blackened moss, the clouds

swelling at the edge of the meadow. And for this,
I did nothing, not even wonder.

You must live for something, they say.
People don't live just to keep on living.

But here is the quince tree, a sky bright and empty.
Here there are blueberries, there is no need to note me.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“Nothing stays long enough to know.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“No one remembers.

But I remember, under the elm's cool awning,
watching you watch the clouds.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“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?”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“in this moment or that one, why do I miss you

now, but not now,
my old idea of you, the feeling for you I lost
and remade so many times until it was

something else, as strange as your touch
was familiar.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“I only

dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets,
of honeybees above you

murmuring into a crown. Antique queen,

the night dreams on:”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“Lift up your head.
Time to enter yourself.
Time to make your own sorrow.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“From above, you looked small
as an afterthought, something lightly brushed in.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“I do not believe in the beauty of falling.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“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.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“Annunciation: Eve to Ave

The wings behind the man I never saw.
But often, afterward, I dreamed his lips,
remembered the slight angle of his hips,
his feet among the tulips and the straw.

I liked the way his voice deepened as he called.
As for the words, I liked the showmanship
with which he spoke them. Behind him, distant ships
went still; the water was smooth as his jaw—

And when I learned that he was not a man—
bullwhip, horsewhip, unzip, I could have crawled
through thorn and bee, the thick of hive, rosehip,
courtship, lordship, gossip and lavender.
(But I was quiet, quiet as
eagerness—that astonished, dutiful fall.)”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“So when you come to me

in your opulent sadness, I see
you do not want me

to unbutton you
so I cannot do the one thing

I can do.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“I cannot find
a picture of you in my mind

to land on.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“You'd been dying so long nothing looked like itself:”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“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.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“. . . where we lounged through summer days, waiting for something to happen”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“I carried you a long way

into my mirror, believing you would carry me

back out.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“Mary secretly thinks she is pretty and therefore deserves to be loved.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“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.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“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—”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“I sit winding blue tape around my wrists
to keep my hands from falling.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“...though she cannot make cannot
make the shuddering lines stay put.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“In her blue dress, she's just a bit of that sky, just a blank bit fallen into the meadow.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“Mary worries about not having enough words in her head”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems