Incarnadine Read Online Free Page A

this long for me to understand
that they are eating). Two flap
—3:33  
their wings without leaving their branches and
I am tired
of paying attention. The birds are all the same
—3:33  
to me. It’s too warm to stay still in the sun, leaning
over this wood fence to try to get a better look
into the branches. Why
—3:33  
do the pigeons gather in this tree
or that one, why leave one for another
in this moment or that one, why do I miss you
—3:33  
now, but not now,
my old idea of you, the feeling for you I lost
and remade so many times until it was
—3:33  
something else, as strange as your touch
was familiar. Why not look up
at high white Alps or down at the
—3:33  
untrumpeted shadows bronzing the water
or wonder why an almost lavender smoke
hovers over that particular orange villa
—3:33  
on the far shoreline or if I am
capable of loving you better
or at all from this distance.

The Cathars Etc.
    loved the spirit most
    so to remind them of the ways of the flesh,
    those of the old god
    took one hundred prisoners and cut off
    each nose
    each pair of lips
    and scooped out each eye
    until just one eye on one man was left
    to lead them home.
    People did that, I say to myself,
    a human hand lopping at a man’s nose
    over and over with a dull blade
    that could not then slice
    the lips clean
    but like an old can opener, pushed
    into skin, sawed
    the soft edges, working each lip
    slowly off as
    both men heavily, intimately
    breathed.
    My brave believer, in my private re-enactments,
    you are one of them.
    I pick up in the aftermath where you’re being led
    by rope
    by the one with the one good eye.
    I’m one of the women at the edge of the hill
    watching you stagger magnificently,
    unsteadily back.
    All your faces are tender with holes
    starting to darken and scab
    and I don’t understand how you could
    believe in anything that much
    that is not me.
    The man with the eye pulls you
    forward. You’re in the square now.
    The women are hysterical,
    the men are making terrible sounds
    from unclosable mouths.
    And I don’t know if I can do it, if I can touch
    a lipless face that might
    lean down, instinctively,
    to try to kiss me.
    White rays are falling through the clouds.
    You are holding that imbecile rope.
    You are waiting to be claimed.
    What do I love more than this
    image of myself?
    There I am in the square walking toward you
    calling you out by name.

To You Again
    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.

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