Annunciation, and: The Kingdom of This World
- Annunciation, and: The Kingdom of This World
Annunciation
Mary might have taken her books, kissed them, buried them away in, say, a blue duffel bag. Even that book on her knee.
Psalms. Poems. Her diary, book of hours. The choir book open on the lectern.
There wasn’t time for a proper abandonment. You see, light fell on the nylon, words thrown into the apartment air now a woman illuminated in cobalt robes turning into herself.
For the moment, there would be no reading. The door opened, broke the sun’s path from the window looking out on a new, ordinary city. [End Page 73]
The Kingdom of This World
Tonight I’m trapped in a movie theater, stuck in a film about human evil while the earth’s shadow moves over the moon. It’s a grainy film, a young woman’s dead body, up close a bloodied stocking. The camera moves over her; the soundtrack inexplicably rises. . . . And outside, the moon is a mirror— the planet mapped there on its face, seen by the dark, untraveled universe. In the film, the lead makes some glib gesture with his hands, imitates shooting someone. (A man murdered in another frame.) And the hills, river valleys, glaciers and jungles, deserts and dark open places on the ocean floor— those shiny electric worms—it all takes just one story, one reel to pass through.
What if I long for heaven like my ancestors did even as our image moves over the moon, too fast? The lunar eclipse, heaven on earth— the backdrop, vast, pierced through with light. [End Page 74]
Anna Catone’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Boston Review, Caketrain, The Cortland Review, Lumina, Post Road, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MA from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, and an undergraduate degree from Princeton University. She lives in Pittsburgh, where she teaches and is associate editor of Coal Hill Review, published by Autumn House Press.
