Jacqueline Kolosov

These last 3 lines echo lines from Mary Szybist’s “What If I Could Look at You” in Granted (Alice James Books).

 

 

Myth: The rose may be the oldest garden plant in cultivation. The flower is depicted in Egyptian tomb paintings long before Cleopatra’s reign, though it was her love of roses—supposedly she rendezvoused with Marc Antony in rooms knee-deep with the fragrant petals—that created a demand for them throughout the world.

 

In Greek mythology, the rose obtains its red color when Aphrodite rushes to her dying lover Adonis’s side. In her hurry, she accidentally treads on the thorns of the white rose, and her blood stains the blossoms red. In sympathy with the doomed lovers, the rose keeps its bloody color.

 

 

Unspoken: The Beast opened his eye and said to Beauty, “You forgot your promise…”
Yes, and now six days later than he expected, she has returned to his garden—her garden, too, for he gave it to her; just as he gave her the high glass room filled with magenta and turquoise birds that spoke her name and the chattering gold-green finches who perched on the tips of her shoulders, then darted high up into the reflecting arc of a bound sky to thread her mouse-brown hair into the nests they tucked into the shadowy eaves. Why, there was even a snow white owl with the face of a prophet whose amber eyes watched over her nights when she could not sleep.

 

The entire place, but especially the garden, ignited in her the desire to write down the stories begun with tales spun from roses; and why not when the roses possessed names like Yolande d’Aragon, Souvenir de la Malmaison, Eglantyne, Jude the Obscure, Bridge of Sighs? Buoyed by stories he placed in her arms like so many fragrant bouquets, this nearsighted, mouse-haired girl who had not done well in school for a long time (for there was her father’s drinking, not to mention the walled-in loneliness of the white room where she still heard her absent mother’s footsteps) traveled to countries she never dreamed of and met people who redefined words she’d gleaned from books: bravery, fidelity, grace, discovery, purpose, compassion. 

 

All this he gave to her on the cool, purple nights among the drifting perfume of roses, the stars whispering other stories—older stories—in the world beyond them, the trees leaning close to listen; ah yes, the dark forest of deep green trees.  

 

“Is it really you?” He asks, stepping into the light of the glass room where this morning’s birds are strangely silent. “Have you really come back?”

 

She knows he wants her to speak the one word he has never spoken, despite the way his stories circled round it; despite the way the profuse hearts of the roses—petals dropping cleanly, clearing the way for further blooms, such a pleasure to behold—dared him to speak it.

 

Perhaps, she thinks, catching sight of her hair glinting high up in one of the nests where six tufted heads are watching her, it is up to her to speak it. Perhaps this is her part in the story. She calculates the number of days and weeks that she has been gone, astonished to see that every nest is now filled with young. Has it really been so long? 

 

“Is your father alright?” he asks, as the downy winged, amber-eyed owl soars through the air to alight, not on her shoulder—the owl never touched her, always kept its distance—but on his. “Did your visit make him happy?”

 

“Yes,” she says, understanding only now that the owl moved through the air with absolute silence. No wonder the other birds are watchful of him, mistrustful, even in this safe place where they are cared for, cherished. For isn’t a part of nature to fear what you cannot see or hear?

 

“I’m glad.” 

 

She feels the word ripening on her tongue. If only she could speak it. 

 

Around them now, a darkness seems to lift, a heaviness even here in this glass-ceilinged room with its dome of light. House, branch, expanse, leave, solace, love. 

 

The snowy owl’s eyes, although amber, point into darkness.

 

Does she dare look past that? Will loving him enable her to look past the long shadows, the dark that seemed to swallow her whole; but not here, no matter that he is more beast than man, never here in this house and garden of light, birdsong, story?

 

If words are not spoken at the proper moment—when a white owl soars silently through the air, when the finch’s green-gold chicks blink in the morning light—will the moment disappear? The chance. Will it no longer be possible? Are the gods listening? Is the deep forest of trees?

 

Her fingertips alight on his scarred arms, where the needles left tracks, a kind of Braille she has never before attempted to read.

 

“You are braver than I expected,” he says, holding her close, holding this woman with a beating heart, this woman who will grow old; but first there are the chicks in the nests above their heads. There is the future rambling towards the present. Twining round them like a forgotten rose.

 

 

Heroine: A woman noted for courage or daring action. The principle female character in a novel, poem, or dramatic presentation. In fiction, the heroine is often an idealistic young woman from a privileged background who longs to distinguish herself through good deeds that simultaneously reinforce an idealized self-image in keeping with an understanding of the world that she has gleaned from books. The heroine’s text typically follows her self-education in the differences between book-learning and real life, selflessness and egotism. Think of Emma Woodhouse and Dorothea Brooke, of Isabel Archer and Helen Schlegel.

 

 

Pilgrim: I have been walking Guadalupe for miles, hoping to see the Number One Bus over my shoulder. Grit coats my teeth and grazes my eyelashes. How could I have forgotten my sunglasses? How I long for a shower. Two miles to go, and I finally stop just outside Urban Outfitters. Another person waits there, too. I take this as a sign that the bus will be here soon.

 

He smiles. In the windblown sunlight, his hair is the color of bottled honey.  “Late?” He asks.

 

I nod.

 

“Me, too.”

 

The cars go by.

 

Minutes later I know his name is Tobias, and he is twenty-four and has been living in a halfway house since February. “Heroin,” he says, “I lost four years of my life. Four years.” He snaps his fingers. “Gone.”

 

Lateness no longer matters, though already I can trace the furrows in my husband Will’s brow despite his smile; but once, wasn’t Will—who lived half a continent away in an arid landscape of yucca and mesquite—a stranger too?

 

“When I walked the Way of Saint James,” I hear myself say, “the miraculous happened. It was part of the journey.”

 

(“But how,” Will and the others will ask, “did you and this guy get on the subject of miracles?”)

 

He’s leans closer, the pupils of his eyes opening like an animal’s when it trusts you. “Like what?”

 

“I met a woman named Erika in Navarre. She was Brazilian. She wore diamonds in her ears, yet she slept beside me on the cool, stone floors of the refuges. She told me to live only in the present, not in the past or in the future. The past and the future are fictions,” I say. “Or perhaps they exist only within the space of the present.”

 

It’s clear Tobias isn’t sure what to make of this. Still, his eyes—more amber than hazel—hold my own, the pupils still open wide.

 

“A pony stepped onto a path in the Pyrenees,” I tell him, shrugging off all I have been told about divulging such petaled secrets to strangers (from the French ‘éstranger’ which is also ‘inconnu’. And yet the Spanish word for pilgrim, ‘peregrino,’ is also the word for curious and strange.)

 

“The pony brought back a poem I love. A poem I had been carrying around for nearly a decade….‘If I stepped out of my body, I would break into blossom.’”

 

“All day,” Tobias says, “I’ve wondered what I did to let the hope in. (Also from Szybist’s poem.) Meaning,” he grins, “I share your sickness.” He names the poets he likes. Plath figures prominently, but there is also Wilbur, O’Hara, and remarkably, John Donne. “Though I hate Bukowski,” he says, “and Kerouac. What show-offs. What goddamned frauds.”

 

How is it possible that he only finished the eighth grade? I wonder later. Or perhaps I misheard his story. After all, he was reading The Leviathian or at least carrying it with him.

 

Though he wears short sleeves, I do not think to look at his arms, not even when he tells me he got down to one hundred and nineteen pounds. He and I stand eye to eye. That makes him five ten.

 

“If I had the money,” he says, “I’d still be doing it. But I had to do things, really bad things.”

 

His mouth is wide and his jaw square. A beautiful kid, I think, though twenty-four makes him a man. Twenty-four. What if his life ended here, this boy-man with honey brown hair and the eyes of an owl who wasted down to one hundred and nineteen pounds?

 

“I changed,” Tobias says, “to chase the dragon. And it scared the hell out of me.”

 

I tell him I understand, reminded of the morning I hurled a lamp down the attic stairs. I didn’t want to hit Will who stood below, but I did want to make him and the argument burning both our tongues—the shame, the ugliness—go away. Vanish. The way a gust of wind can clear a rose garden, leaving only the thorny stems. Blinking in the exposed attic light, he slammed the door so hard the wood cracked, and the door jammed. I sat down on the stairs and wept. He listened, but after a while—how long? I could not count the minutes—he jimmied the door and set me free.

 

But what if we’d let the anger escalate? What if it burned and spread like the wildfires raging just north of the drought-infested country where we live?

 

“If you were still doing it, the heroin,” I tell Tobias, “there would be only one ending to your story.”

 

“I know.” His eyes close a little. The sun is bright.

 

The bus pulls up, and we board, then sit side by side in the narrow seats, knees bumping.

 

All day I’ve wondered what I did to let the hope in.

 

The cars go by. The bus chugs down Guadalupe.

 

“I’m getting off at the courthouse,” Tobias says, then rattles off a day filled with the kind of errands that require one to wait and fill out forms and never use one’s head.

 

“You should go back to school when you get out,” I tell him.

 

He stares hard at me, shrugs, tells me he’d like to. “But how?”

 

How? I want to ask him about his family in Baltimore. Doesn’t he have any contact with them? Isn’t there somebody? Instead I say, “Give me your address. I’ll send you a parcel.”

 

“Yeah?” He says, writing down the halfway house’s address where he’ll be living through May.

“Poetry,” I say. “I’ll send you a parcel of poetry. We’ll keep in touch.” I scribble my email address on a postcard, reminded that there is a risk here I cannot lose sight of; for the desire to help carries with it a responsibility. Do I really want to take on that—do I really want to take him on, a boy-man-I just met at a bus stop?

 

I hesitate; but Tobias is smiling at me now, his eyes shining. Quickly, I hand him my address, Heroine@gmail.com, telling myself that one letter separates an exemplar from the irretrievable, one letter spans the distance between possibility and addiction. But he’s here beside me, so the single vowel must matter infinitely more than its absence.

 

The card changes hands, and it’s then I see the tracks. They remind me of journeys through northern cities in Germany on trains that gray, cold, rainy season I lived in a centuries-old village outside of Nuernberg and missed home so much I spoke English aloud in my room, rolled my loved ones names around on my tongue, and went for endless runs in the maze of forest beyond, never once considering I’d lose my way.             

 

But the tracks also bring back the night I stole into my neighbor’s garden and plundered her roses. Because her husband wanted to hurt my dog. Wanted to scare him off with a shovel because he’d been digging their prized flower beds. Or so the neighbor’s husband said. The dog limped home and wouldn’t allow me to touch his right side, though the neighbor’s husband denied hitting him. It was the height of summer, and the roses were sachets of long-necked blooms of a red so velvet dark they looked black. Bleeding hearts in starlight. I broke the roses off one by one, twisting the stems with my bare hands, the thorns puncturing my palms and the delicate undersides of my wrists. Did I think she’d catch me? Dream that her husband would come after me with a shovel? Bruise my ribs?

 

But what if I was Tobias, the shadow self chasing the dragon of death Freud talks about, a self I have met, more than once, in the mirror’s reflected eye? (Consider the shattered lamp below the staircase, shards so sharp they cut my palm.) And what if I stole into their house after dark and filled my jacket and jeans pockets and armfuls of black trash bags with the things they valued? And what if they caught me? Would the neighbor’s husband have broken my ribs? Or maybe I would have carried a gun. Would I have fired? What if the story had ended there?

 

It’s Tobias’s stop.

 

“Keep in touch,” I say.

 

 “You won’t forget?” The honey-gold hair falls across one eye.

 

“Absolutely not.”

 

He grins, gives me a thumbs up. 

 

The cars go by. I settle my head against the window, follow his retreating figure into the crowd until the bus propels him out of sight.

 

 

Heroin: Meaning ‘heroic’ from the German word ‘heroisch.’ After an injection, the heroin user feels a rush of euphoria accompanied by a flushing of the skin and a sensation of warmth, a rush so powerful it outweighs the fatigue and clouded mental functioning that follow. With regular use, the user must rely on increasing amounts of the drug to achieve the same effect.

 

The body responds to heroin by reducing and sometimes stopping the production of endorphins, that essential substance regularly released in the brain and nerves to attenuate pain. Within six to eight hours after the last dose, withdrawal sets in. The diminished or vanished endorphin production results in extreme symptoms of pain even when there is no physical trauma.

 

 

Myth: Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, created a poppy drink to ease the corn goddess Demeter’s grief after her daughter Persephone was abducted to the underworld. Because of Demeter’s mourning, nothing grew, and famine overtook the earth. After drinking Hypnos’s potion, Demeter fell into a deep sleep. When she awoke, she felt comforted, and the earth once more became fertile.

 

 

Reality: Heroin comes from the opium poppy, which the Sumerians called Hut Gil or ‘flower of joy.’ It flourishes in dry, hot climates. Today it is primarily grown by impoverished farmers in the mountains that extend across south Asia from Turkey through Pakistan and Laos. Heroin is obtained from the egg-shaped seed pod left behind once the flower’s petals have fallen away. Inside the pod is a milky sap: heroin in its crudest form. To begin the purification process, the sap is mixed with lime in boiling water, and the white substance that collects on the surface—morphine—is collected, reheated with ammonia, filtered and boiled until it becomes a brown paste. This paste is poured into molds and dried in the sun, the resulting substance is smokable; or ready for further processing as heroin, a much more complicated process of purification involving a series of chemical distillations.

 

 

Tobias: In the Apocrypha, Tobias is both the good father and the good son. After losing his property, his station, even his eyesight, the elder Tobias sends his son and his dog on a journey to the distant city of Rages to recover the money he left in the care of a friend. Before the younger Tobias sets out, a traveling companion joins him. The man calls himself Azarias though he is in reality the angel Raphael in disguise. Azarias promises the father that he will lead Tobias to Rages and bring him home alive.

 

Along the way, Tobias meets Sarah, a kinswoman whose life has been a series of miseries because a devil has strangled each of her seven husbands (on the wedding night) in the hopes of possessing her. Sarah is beautiful and good, and Tobias would like to make her his wife. But he fears the fate of the men who came before him.

 

To conquer the fear, Azarias shows Tobias how to destroy this devil that has secreted himself inside the sequined body of a giant fish. “Cut out its heart and liver and burn them,” Azarias instructs. “It will drive the devil far away, but save the gall. The gall,” he says, a flutter of wing beats hovering, “will heal your father’s eyes.”

 

In the apocryphal story, events turn out just as Raphael says. Tobias marries Sarah and is not strangled. In the city of Rages, he recovers the money from his father’s friend and returns home. With the gall of the fish, which he has carried all this way, Tobias anoints his father’s blind eyes. For be assured, the angel tells him, that his eyes shall be presently opened, and thy father shall see the light of heaven, and shall rejoice in the sight of thee.

 

 

Ramble: If words are not spoken at the proper moment—when a white owl soars silently through the air, when the finch’s green-gold chicks blink in the morning light, when a boy-man with honey gold hair begins to speak to you on a windblown afternoon at a bus stop, when an angel reveals himself—will the moment disappear? The chance. Will it be no longer possible? Are the gods listening? Is the deep forest of trees?

 

 

Apocrypha: Lucifer is Venus as morning star. Lucifer as bringer of light.

 

Long after Lucifer fell, Raphael accompanied Tobias on a journey to the distant city of Rages. Before Tobias left, his father said, “See thou never do to another what thou wouldst hate to have done to thee…” Yet to destroy the devil, Tobias had to burn his lungs and liver. But, a small voice says—a child’s voice perhaps?—the gall restored Tobias’s father’s sight. And so restored his own…

 

But the Apocrypha, as we know, is not the official story, so dare we believe it? How dare we not believe?

 

 

Ramble: Prick a finger, and you bleed. Everyone knows that. Still, the fragrance kindles in you a hunger. And perhaps also a desire. To fly. To overreach yourself. Luciferin, luciferase.

 

 

Once Upon a Time: Imagine the boy-man with honey blonde hair and the amber eyes of an owl meets a girl at the courthouse. Imagine that she is reading a book with gold-leaf pages that carry the musty smell of a childhood library thousands of miles from this mid-size Texas city where addiction led him. A hundred and nineteen pounds. Rages.

 

The boy-man wants to know what she is reading.

 

“Fairy tales.” And when he blinks at her—wondering who will slam the door on his sunlight, wondering if something nice will happen—she adds, “But it’s not what you think.”

 

“How can you know what I’m thinking?” he says. “I mean, you’ve never met me. Until now.”

 

So he introduces himself. And so does she.

 

After all, there must still be a few stories that begin Once upon a time…Even though the cars go by. Even though people slam doors. Kick dogs. Carry scars. Steal.

 

Once upon a time in a mid-size Texas city on a hot, dusty day, a boy-man with honey blonde hair and the amber eyes of an owl meets a girl in a courthouse. Her name is not Sarah but Penelope, though she goes by Penny. He asks her why she doesn’t carry shiny, copper pennies in her shoes, and instead of telling him to ‘Get lost,’ she actually smiles. And so he sits down beside her, and suddenly the mindless task he doesn’t like—even though it fills the days, and they are so difficult to get through now that he is no longer invincible-euphoric-riding the tail of the dragon—becomes not just bearable, but a pleasure.

 

All day I’ve wondered what I did to let the hope in…

 

 

Gold Leaf: Birds settle onto branches. At dusk. Two thousand blackbirds chirp, their silhouetted bodies a Japanese ink painting along a cool, stone wall in a clean room on an emerald mountain…

 

Lovers embrace in a high-ceilinged room of glass surrounded by birds. The birds raise their voices in song.

 

Rain falls.

 

A child turns the page, and a girl—call her Beauty—presses her face to the glass. Her father is returning from his journey. In his hands, he holds a single rose, its high-pointed bloom like the hope she kept alive all through his absence.

 

The amber-eyed boy-man didn’t know if he could believe she’d send the parcel. So many gaps, so many broken promises. Yet here it is. Books of poetry wrapped in brown paper. Battered but whole.

 

One letter separates an exemplar from the irretrievable—but here he sits beside me. Proof of miracles? That the desire for life is stronger than the drive towards death? 

 

All day I’ve wondered what I did to let the hope in…

 

Hope. Admit her.