Free Incarnadine by Mary Szybist Page B

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