46
" Approaching Elegy
It's hard to believe you are dying: like looking
at a Jamesian scene, skipping past happiness
to a garden bench beyond the trees. You fill the form
of heroine: you sit in your black dress, too tired to imagine
the rest of yourself.
An old suitor appears, grabs you possibly
too forcefully by the wrists (he is still impossibly
in love—). You disengage your wrists. He leans forward, looks
into your eyes, which you close—as if you were all by yourself.
He moves closer, talking very fast about happiness.
He places his cloak on your shoulders, imagines
he'll rescue you. Around you, forms
grow darker: house, branch, hydrangea. Above you, freckled
expanses of leaves form
the beginnings of barbed, lopsided shrouds—a possible
solace. If only his kiss could please you, I wouldn't need to imagine
past the clean architecture of the story. And perhaps it is wrong to look
past that. Wrong to ask about happiness.
Past midnight, he continues to offer himself.
Before, he had offered aimless passion, but now (you see it for yourself)
he has an idea: he points into the darkness. He is grave, formal.
The dark has swallowed the long shadows of the oaks (though not
your unhappiness)
—and it is about to swallow you. Soon, it will no longer be possible
(there is just one more page to turn) for me to look
through your eyes, so I would like to imagine
for you: something past tragedy. Just as I would like to imagine
that we are not in danger, that we have selves
more solid than stars, that we are safe in the pages of books we can
reopen to look
at each other. Except that we are not women formed
of words, but of impossible
longings. What was it that you wanted besides happiness?
You are dying. I have no ideas about happiness
and no patience to imagine
it possible.
Soon you will not be the heroine; you will not be yourself.
And it's not that you've lost the formula; your form
is losing you. Look
at how brave you are: I imagined the great point was to be happy,
as happy as possible
with the quick forms that imagine us—but the last time I looked
there you were—distant and bright in the not so blue darkness,
imagining yourself. "
― Mary Szybist , Granted
53
" 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
55
" 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
