Mary Szybist

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.

The sculptures in this gallery have been carefully treated with a protective wax so that visitors may touch them.

Again this morning my eyes woke up too close to your eyes, their almost green orbs too heavy-lidded to really look back. To wake up next to you is ordinary. I do not even need to look at you to see you. But I do look. 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. Now it is almost one a.m. I am still at my desk and you are upstairs at your desk a staircase away from me. Already it is years of you a staircase away from me. To be near you and not near you is ordinary. You are ordinary. Still, how many afternoons have I spent peeling blue paint from our porch steps, peering above hedgerows, the few parked cars for the first glimpse of you. How many hours under the overgrown, pink Camillas, thinking the color was wrong for you, thinking you'd appear after my next blink. Soon you'll come down the stairs to tell me something. And I'll say, okay. Okay. I'll say it like that, say it just like that, I'll go on being your never-enough. It's not the best in you I long for. It's when you're noteless, numb at the ends of my fingers, all is all. I say it is.

—how her loose curls float above each silver fish as she leans in to pluck its eyes— You died just hours ago. Not suddenly, no. You'd been dying so long nothing looked like itself: from your window, fishermen swirled sequins; fishnets entangled the moon. Now the dark rain looks like dark rain. Only the wine shimmers with candlelight. I refill the glasses and we raise a toast to you as so and so's daughter—elfin, jittery as a sparrow— slides into another lap to eat another pair of slippery eyes with her soft fingers, fingers rosier each time, for being chewed a little. If only I could go to you, revive you. You must be a little alive still. I'd like to put this girl in your lap. She's almost feverishly warm and she weighs hardly anything. I want to show you how she relishes each eye, to show you her greed for them. She is placing one on her tongue, bright as a polished coin— What do they taste like? I ask. Twisting in my lap, she leans back sleepily. They taste like eyes, she says.

for Lily Mae The job was easy: I tucked them in, kicked off my shoes, listened for the floor to go quiet. Everyone slept except one: outside her door, she paced, she hummed, holding the edge of her torn nightgown. Pointing, I told her: to bed.Your bed. But she would not stay there. She was old, older than my mother: manic, caught up in gibberish, determined to sleep on my cot— At first it was just to quiet her. I could only sleep if she slept, and I needed relief from myself. That is how she became a body next to mine whether or not I wanted there to be a body. She climbed into my bed. I let her sleep hot and damp against my spine. All night she rocked, she turned, she poked her spastic elbows into my calves and slurred her broken noises in the dark. All the old fans went round in clicks those summer nights—and she rolled in bed and kicked me in the head and I was happy. No words, no tricks, I just didn't love my loneliness. My mind felt cooler with her there. Beside her, I could have been anyone. She had no word for me and not the kind of mind to keep one. And if she kicked me, some nights, just for the fun of it—who was I to disappoint my one? Sometimes I imagine I was someone she won at a fair as the wheel spun under the floating, unfaltering sun and clicked each lucky one and one until I was happily undone.

Knock me or nothing, the things of this world ring in me, shrill-gorged and shrewish, clicking their charms and their chains and their spouts. Let them. Let the fans whirr. All the similar virgins must have emptied their flimsy pockets, and I was empty enough, sugared and stretched on the unmown lawn, dumb as the frost-pink tongues of the unpruned roses. When you put your arms around me in that moment, when you pulled me to you and leaned back, when you lifted me just a few inches, when you shook me hard then, had you ever heard such emptiness? I had room for every girl's locket, every last dime and pocketknife. Oh my out-sung, fierce, unthinkable— why rattle only the world you placed in me? Won't you clutter the unkissed, idiot stars? They blink and blink like quiet shepherds, like brides-about-your-neck. Call them out of that quietness. Knock them in their nothing, against their empty enamel, against the dark that has no way to hold them and no appetite. Call in the dead to touch them. Let them slip on their own chinks of light.

Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung to the dark of it: the legs of the spider held the tucked wings close, held the abdomen still in the midst of calling with thrusts of phosphorescent light— When I am tired of being human, I try to remember the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them central in my mind where everything else must surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them. There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose there are grips from which even angels cannot fly. Even imagined ones.Luciferin, luciferase. When I am tired of only touching, I have my mouth to try to tell you what, in your arms, is not erased.

I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheelto a kitchen stool and watch it turn.—DUCHAMP I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air and watch them pop. I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each other all evening. I had the happy idea to create a void in myself. Then to call it natural. Then to call it supernatural. I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin. I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like Helen or Jesus except in the sense of changing everything. I had the happy idea that someday I would find both pleasure and punishment, that I would know them and feel them, and that, until I did, it would be almost as good to pretend. I had the happy idea to call myself happy. I had the happy idea that the dog digging a hole in the yard in the twilight had his nose deep in mold-life. I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do, and then the happier idea to buckle myself into two blue velvet shoes. I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say hello to my own blue soul.Hello, blue soul. Hello. It was my happiest idea.

Mary who mattered to me, gone or asleep among fruits, spilled in ash, in dust, I did not leave you. Even now I can't keep from composing you, limbs & blue cloak & soft hands. I sleep to the sound of your name, I say there is no Mary except the word Mary, no trace on the dust of my pillowslip. I only dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets, of honeybees above you murmuring into a crown. Antique queen, the night dreams on: here are the pears I have washed for you, here the heavy-winged doves, asleep by the hyacinths. Here I am, having bathed carefully in the syllables of your name, in the air and the sea of them, the sharp scent of their sea foam. What is the matter with me? Mary, what word, what dust can I look behind? I carried you a long way into my mirror, believing you would carry me back out. Mary, I am still for you, I am still a numbness for you.