Incarnadine Quotes

“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

“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

“No one remembers.

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

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

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

“Lift up your head.
Time to enter yourself.
Time to make your own sorrow.”
― 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

“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 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

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

“I carried you a long way

into my mirror, believing you would carry me

back out.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“. . . where we lounged through summer days, waiting for something to happen”
― 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

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

“I cannot find
a picture of you in my mind

to land on.”
― 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

“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