The Sheering Sun

There are those with whom I have nothing in common but the blood that runs in the veins. Cliche. The word blind doesn't mean what you think, if you're able and are you? Seeing nothing but light. Our shadow selves. Reading poetry this morning.


In the Beginning God
Said Light

Mary Szybist

and there was light.
Now God says, Give them a little theatrical lighting

and they're happy,
and we are. So many of us

dressing each morning, testing
endless combinations, becoming in our mirrors

more ourselves, imagining,
in an entrance, the ecstatic

weight of human eyes.
Now that the sun is sheering

toward us, what is left
but to let it close in

for our close-up? Let us really feel
how good it feels

to be still in it, making
every kind of self that can be

looked at. God, did you make us
to be your bright accomplices?

God, here are our shining spines.
Let there be no more dreams of being

more than a beginning.
Let it be

that to be is to be
backlit, and then to be only that light.

via poem-a-day

Musings on Rejection and Dejection or Drejection

I'm a week and a half away from leaving for three weeks, and I feel as if I'm wandering around in circles. I'm not complaining. I just don't know what to do first. My legs are leaden and my head filled with cotton. I feel strangely dejected despite all the good fortune coming my way.

I pulled a card out of my Poet Tarot deck this morning to see what I had in store this week. I got the Five of Mentors. I consulted the guidebook and learned that key phrases for this card are: disagreement within creative groups, being flexible in my artistic vision, choosing battles wisely.

Here's my advice to you, if you're a writer. Submit your work widely and then chill out. Chill out when you get rejections because you'll probably get a lot. For every ten things I've sent out over the years, I get about eight or nine rejections. Years ago, a literary agent sent a manuscript back to me with the words too sad written on the cover sheet. That was it. Sometimes rejections are wildly entertaining, like the one I got over the weekend from a literary journal named after a body of land with some amount of water around it. This is what it said:

Dear Elizabeth, 

Thank you for sending your work. Unfortunately, "Dreaming of Sex During Acupuncture" is not for us. Good luck with your writing and thank you for your interest in [name of journal]. 

Sincerely, 
the editors 

Doesn't that tickle you? I imagine you're wondering about the title of the piece I sent in, and hopefully you'll read the whole thing one day because I'm sending it back out. I'll keep you posted.




While vacuuming my car this morning, I pulled Frank O'Hara's little Lunch Poems out of the door pocket and opened it up, even as I scraped the dead leaves and grit from the floor. My heart is in my pocket, I read from the poem A Step Away from Them. How perfect is that? My other advice to writers is to read all the time and stash small poetry books in weird places.


Have I told you about my obsession with the Annunciation? Given my estrangement from the Roman Catholic faith, I'm not sure why I find it so compelling, but there's something about a big old angel leaning down to softly tell a virginal woman that she'll be carrying the son of God that knocks me flat. There's all this grace inherent in the gesture, I think. My favorite painting is Fra Angelico's Annunciation, and after visiting Italy for the second time and seeing it, after which I had a disturbing encounter with an epileptic young woman, its significance became all the greater. You honestly can't make that shit up, and I didn't. I did write an essay, though, that was accepted for publication by Slow Trains years and years ago. It was rejected at least five times before being accepted. You can read it if you like.

Anyhoo.



Mary Szybist wrote an entire book of poems about the Annunciation. It's called Incarnadine. Here's one of the poems:

Annunciation Overheard from the Kitchen

I could hear them from the kitchen, speaking as if
something important had happened.

I was washing the pears in cool water, cutting the bruises from them.
From my place at the sink, I could hear

a jet buzz hazily overhead, a vacuum
start up next door, the click,
click between shots.

"Mary, step back from the camera."

There was a softness to his voice
but no fondness, no hurry in it.

There were faint sounds
like walnuts being dropped by crows onto the street,
almost a brush
of windchime from the porch -----

Windows around me everywhere half-open ----

My skin alive with the pitch.

Mary Szybist



Maybe I'm weird, but that just blows my tiny little mother mind.™

Illumination

Those who've been reading here for a while know that my favorite painting is Fra Angelico's Annunciation, hanging at San Marco, a monastery in Florence, Italy, and that I wrote an essay years ago about it that was published online at Slow Trains. Tonight, I was sitting in Sophie's room with her at the most brilliant part of the day when the sun shines through her window and illuminates everything. I took a series of photos of Sophie that, to me, caught her luminous beauty perfectly.

Then I sat on the floor in front of her, and she reached over and touched my hair, played with it, tentatively. I sat in shadow, held my breath.

The poet Mary Szybist has a collection called Incarnadine whose poems are inspired by the Annunciation -- which for those of you who don't know, is when the Angel Gabriel descends from heaven and approaches the virgin Mary to tell her that she will bear the son of God. The back of the book describes the collection like this:

Through the lens of an iconic moment, the Annunciation of an unsettling angel to a bodily young woman, Szybist describes the confusion and even terror of moments in which our longing for the spiritual may also be a longing for what is most fundamentally alien to us. 

I don't know why this book, that painting came to mind when I sat with Sophie in the sunlight and shadows. Perhaps it was because of the great silence that is Sophie, her tentative grace, the way she is bathed in light yet at once so dark and mysterious, my own longing for the numinous, to bestow meaning and light despite that darkness and mystery.



Heroine as She Turns to Face Me

Just before the curtain closes, she turns
toward, me, loosening
her gauzy veil & bright hair --

This, she seems to say, this
to create scene, the pure sweep of it,
this to give in, feel the lushness,
this & just a little theatrical lighting
& you, too, can be happy,
she's sure of it --

It's as if I cut her heart-whole from the sky,
rag & twist & tongue & the now terrible speed
of her turning

toward me like the spirit
I meant to portray, indefatigable --

see how bravely she turns, how exactly true to the turning,
& in the turning
most herself,
as she arranges herself for the exit

withholding nothing, unraveling
the light in her hair as her face

her bright, unapproachable face
says only that
whatever the next scene is
she will fill it.

Mary Szybist
from Incarnadine

Saturday Rapture

Last night, I drove Henry to the Pacific Palisades -- a twenty mile drive that took about an hour on a Friday night in Los Angeles --  for a baseball game, and no sooner had the boys begun to play then the fog rolled in and it was cancelled. We drove home.

This morning, The Husband informed me that Sophie had wet through the bed -- again -- so I pulled her sheets off, down to the mattress and put them in the wash -- again. I brought her into bed with me and read.

I'm reading a book of poetry called Incarnadine by Mary Szybist and feel enraptured. I wrote an essay of sorts a while back about the effect of a painting called The Annunciation by Fr'a Angelico on me when I visited Florence, Italy. You can read it here. I have copies of the painting everywhere in my house, under the glass top to my desk, on my bookshelves -- it informs me.

Szybists' book of poetry takes the moment when the angel Gabriel announces what the future has in store for the human Mary and uses that to spin poems about paradox of the spirit and the body. The poems are not religious but rapturous. They are sensuous, nearly erotic. One describes the annunciation from the point of view of the grass:

how many moments did it hover before we felt
it was like nothing else, it was not bird
light as mosquito, the aroma of walnut husks
while the girl's knees pressed into us
every spear of us rising, sunlit and coarse
the wild bees murmuring through

It's overcast here in Los Angeles, and there are no baseball games. I'm a woman of leisure with three children on a Saturday, reading poems.