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Incarnadine: Poems QUOTES

Incarnadine: Poems QUOTES

1 " Days go by when I do nothing but underline the damp edge of myself. "

― Mary Szybist , Incarnadine: Poems

2 " Nothing stays long enough to know. "

― Mary Szybist , Incarnadine: Poems

3 " 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

4 " I carried you a long way

into my mirror, believing you would carry me

back out. "

― Mary Szybist , Incarnadine: Poems

5 " 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

6 " Mary secretly thinks she is pretty and therefore deserves to be loved. "

― Mary Szybist , Incarnadine: Poems

7 " 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

8 " I cannot find
a picture of you in my mind

to land on. "

― Mary Szybist , Incarnadine: Poems

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " From above, you looked small
as an afterthought, something lightly brushed in. "

― Mary Szybist , Incarnadine: Poems

12 " Lift up your head.
Time to enter yourself.
Time to make your own sorrow. "

― Mary Szybist , Incarnadine: Poems

13 " 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

14 " No one remembers.

But I remember, under the elm's cool awning,
watching you watch the clouds. "

― Mary Szybist , Incarnadine: Poems

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " . . . where we lounged through summer days, waiting for something to happen "

― Mary Szybist , Incarnadine: Poems

18 " You'd been dying so long nothing looked like itself: "

― Mary Szybist , Incarnadine: Poems

19 " Without you my air tastes like nothing. For you I hold my breath. "

― Mary Szybist , Incarnadine: Poems

20 " 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