Mary Szybist
There was a butterfly bush in my yard
I hated it.
Its gaudy over-flowering
that made my breathing harder.
With a too-small handsaw, I went
at it. Piled what I
hacked at.
*
Who chooses suffering without knowing
some joy in it. Could my mother have
stayed, as I saw her
stay, to flinch, as I saw her
flinch, at my father’s touch if=
she did not believe in the good of it.
*
I was a girl who wanted
to be like my mother—infinitely
gentle. You’d understand if I could show you
her picture. I listened to
her listen to my father. She couldn’t
keep her Sunday dresses
pressed enough. What’s wrong
with her, my father asked
me. Always, he wanted to know, but not
enough to let her answer.
*
The bush lounged in the grass,
blooming its lurid purples. All summer
I breathed it in.
I could see it from the bedroom window.
Sometimes I’d wake up remembering
nothing of myself. I’d just look
at the fact of the bush
beyond the curtain’s billowing.
Then one morning I thought
To have a pretty enemy
and the chance to destroy its
prettiness—
*
I wanted to take it out myself
though my tools were old, wrong
for the task. Sun, blood,
dirt in my sweat and
skin. I hacked at
its branches. Then tried
to muscle the hard earth
up. When the shovel broke,
I tried with a borrowed trowel.
*
We were a tableau.
Slow and blow by blow,
I winnowed it; tried to
break its hold rocking
it. Against my weight, it
held its ground; then I was
holding half its crazed
roots in the air—
*
Over the rest I poured poison.
Raked them over with dirt.
Eventually I would plant
some ornamental grasses there.
At the Chekhov Symposium
On the stage of the black box theater where the panel had just finished, the Russian scholar was, in its dimmed spotlights, wonderful to look at, precise in the gestures she made with her hands. Everyone always thinks, she explained, that you can fix representation . . .
She kept talking like that. The more she talked the more I began to feel tenderly toward Chekhov who, she said, didn’t understand performance. Someone crossed the stage with the scholar’s infant daughter, bringing her back to her. She smiled widely, lifted her daughter over her head, once, twice, so that she could look up at her. She was lecturing beautifully. Mothering beautifully. And then (she had to prepare for her next panel), there was a baby in my arms.
Baby, I said to the baby, how are you so light?
I carried her through the lobby door into the morning. It was early May. Chickadees and sparrows were skittering the cherry trees. I looked at our reflection in the lobby window. Look at you, I said, but it was me who was looking.
Pink blossoms pooled gauzily behind us. You look like a Madonna!, someone said, walking past us, kissing his fingers.
I kept looking at us. The more I looked the more I began to feel tenderly toward any painter in the world who was, at that moment, trying to make an image that didn’t refer to anything.
And tenderly toward Chekhov, his preoccupation with inwardness, and towards the actors Stanislavski put inside his plays who had to remember each night what hurt them.
The light staccato of her breathing slowed. I felt her relax against me, her particular scent, her particular heat. I prefer you to everyone, I whispered, and wondered if I really did mean it.
When I first heard Stanislavski’s name, the drama teacher at my summer camp was gesturing opulently with his lit cigarette as he spoke about actors, real ones, who understood that they couldn’t pretend. They knew they had to conjure feelings they’d actually felt. They had to remember them.
He cast me in a nightclub scene. Told everyone to watch. Was I pretending or remembering, he asked them afterward. His mouth was so close I could smell the smoke that had just been inside it.
The nightclub—I’d seen it only through a window. The sheen of patterned polyesters stretched across bodies in a dim haze. My mother and I were lost after dark in the city, and I waited as she stepped in to ask directions. I tracked her face through the glass that reflected mine. Who I held inside my face and who fell outside it in the glass kept shifting. Cherried cocktails floated above tables toward cherry-colored mouths. Everyone inside looked happy in the smoky light except my mother, who looked beautiful. There was a new softness in her face, like it had just begun to come out of focus. And there was my face: somehow tall enough, cheekbones and a jawline sharp enough, to look like someone.
She’s so small, said someone.
My arms were becoming tired.
In some myths of the afterlife, we get to choose one moment of our lives, and then we’re locked into it forever.
Of how to remember this moment, I tell myself a story: When I was alive, I held her. And I was distracted the whole time by how I looked there.
Mary Szybist is most recently the author of Incarnadine. She teaches at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.