1000 Words: Portrait Of Yasmin In The Color of Rose

Prose to a photograph of my wife

Portrait of Yasmin Vereen

“Many years I survived, on a diet of longing,
taking my defeats, while turning them to song
they say love is fleeting, but surely, they are foolish
for in her eyes, love is not short, but is long”

—Song For Yasmin

What secrets does a reflection keep inside its rosy grasp? None. They have all given themselves up freely, without reservation or mild hesitation. I carry them warmly in my curved palm; closed, yes, but unstrained, loose—as one does a handful of freshly picked flowers.

From São Paulo and its guttered mouth, the corridor of Paulista and its incoherent street performers, holding up signs in protest or support, banging their barbaric drums, blaring their ballads to the rhythm of city buses, steamy canals underneath flowing righteously next to the rocket-blasted railways there is You–meu amor, minha esposa—the child inside the circus city of knife-jugglers, sweaty suit lawmen, corrupt cops and the handsome gangsters of the cacophonic metropolis—which has no children. There are no children in São Paulo. But there is you.

Yes, from the country mouth of Bauru, and into the skillet, your teeth have been cut, your wings have been born and spread. Your legs have skipped through every studded crosswalk, you’ve sipped from its silvery cups, slashed through the night in adolescent rage. Imprinted your footsteps in its sloping gridded concrete, risen in the calling of morning, have become saturated in all aspects of its exhausting culture.

Here, now: Tchaikovsky blares. The slicing of the violin in the tenor of silk, lace. In your porcelain reflection, grace meets its definition. Without its defining, all grace is lost. But this is a feeling. It requires neither articulation nor translation. Its meaning is understood when met where it lies; its comprehension is universal- its language traverses all time and space.

In that rosy reflection–a bust cut to precious form. An inexplicable throat. A raised shoulder. Black pearl eyes, liquified, sharp-still. A cursive, brimming hair of Greek Tragedy proportions. But what little tragedy there is! Inside the image there is a goldmine. Flooded with rosy light at some angles, crimson blood in others. There are flowers blossoming from your ears! There are jewels dripping from your bosom!

Travel with me, now. We have pushed putrid waters back in flooded kitchens, seen the gardens weep in dehydrated agony, wrestled with drooling mongrels on the road to and from nowhere, held hands in slumber, broken silence in lust, rented rooms by the hour, huddled into buses with decaying, acrid air, fanned the embers of raging timber, levitated our bodies into the skyscape on dubious cables. Mythologized into being our saturated hearts, invented a silent religion that has no sacred text, collaborated in the damned, infinite cosmos– only in ways we know how, truly.

These are things that we know: little matters beyond us. We are left with little choice, but it is our preference. In the French language, instead of saying “I miss you” it is something more like “you are missing from me”. How starved I must have been! How my bones must have ached, head must have pounded, produced nightmares, only to be yearning for that which went unnamed, unannounced, unintroduced.

And now, what grace you fill the rooms of our homes, which are like hotels-anonymous, unimportant, temporary. My heart! Yearning for its own dignity, pulsating, inexplicably to the mythic rhythms of Bossa Nova. João Gilberto has been in my heart all along!

And when did I begin to write in this way? Flowery, gaudy–it is too much! But how else does one go about it? I want gut punch words–Bombastic, explosive! Who would want a text culled and trimmed? What good is the infinitely precise? I have no precision. It is only precise vomit. Every word may very well end in an exclamation point! I will say these words again very soon, I am sure.

Your reflection is of the city. The city is of your reflection. In the puddles of the street there is your reflection. In the infinite glass panels lining the anonymous avenues is your reflection. In the windows of the caterpillar buses and the spider taxi cabs there is your reflection. In the moonish eye of midnight, there it is..

Yes, the city is calling you! Its waiting with the patience of nurses, angels, owls, dark stained woods, graceful red linens, antique books. The skyscrapers are in mourning. The city does not say it misses you, it says you are missing from it. Of course, the city tells no lies. It can only spew the truth through its sewers, its incessant crime, through its very own corruption! The corrupt truth! The radio towers are signaling their own demise in your absence!

The city will crumble in phosphorescent calamity! But there is time. It is a patient place. It is always moving and changing and therefore it is always the same. Its evolution is consistent as the frozen galaxy from which it was born.

Right at this very moment, young waiters with slickly combed black hair and bowties are rushing cachaça and bolinhos to drunken patrons on the overflowing patios of Augusta and Pamplona. Portions of French fries and frango à passarinho are frying in lard. The scent of lime and mint are misting the drunken air. You have not forgotten these scenes–they have not forgotten you. It will not take long. You will embrace them once again, quite soon, I am sure!

Now, think back to your metropolitan womb! Yes, after the hills and mountains of Minas Gerais have washed themselves from the horizon of your mind’s eye, after the last echo of the howling canines have faded into silence, after the rats have been washed away, after the toiling in an average city, an average town, an average people with an average cuisine–yes, after all of that your city womb is calling you by your name. It is extending its loving arms and awaits your embrace.

JSV
2024

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