Written after reading Patrick Süskind’s novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
I see a bright white light at
the place where
the doors of dark pine
fail to meet.
There is movement on the other side.
I have learned that
love is cheap here,
and something is important
about the idea of
a nice girl.
I meet her everywhere
in his diary
with its broken pages.
I don’t understand it.
She can’t be
real.
My hands are covered in dust.
I smell a kind of dying.
It’s here. He’s here, too.
This cipher of a man,
this scentless apprentice,
he keeps his secrets close.
So I rifled his pages.
He’s working on
something big—
a collection of specimens
whom he thinks perfect.
Briefly, his gaze fell on me.
And I wanted to be
his
stretched out
in a glass casket
arms open wide.
As if to say:
here I am,
I am yours.
I would be
kept and treasured,
the surface of my glass
marred only by
his single fingerprint.
Or so I thought.
My glass was filled with
a dark liquid,
occult medicine.
I sipped and glanced around me
in the blackness of the mortuary,
my eyes finding him
in the crowd,
walking toward me.
I closed my eyes as
he ran his fingers
through my red hair.
His lips
travelled over my skin,
sticky with the scent
of apricots
that I had just
finished slicing.
I wanted
to be lost
in the cold night
of his eyes
as my breaths
paused.
I opened my eyes.
He was no more than
a bad ghost.
You and I are so alike, I said.
His face darkened
as he turned away—
a sudden dance step.
He kept moving,
kept looking,
kept spinning.
His hands
reaching out
to other women,
whose bodies
were drawn to his,
gray moths to a black light,
birds chattering with a joy
unknown to either of us.
I stood still. Waited.
Dressed in black silk,
back arched,
pale hand falling
out of a reach,
watching the movement
in the light at the space
between the doors.
I am not free, like you.
I called out,
broken open like a shot bird.
In one swift motion,
he returned,
slamming me
in the back of the skull
with an object
which flashed
like a hungry fish rising
from the murky depths
of a pond.
I had no time to feel
fear—
only how irrevocably
in love I was.
My sight dimmed,
the dark doors opened.
Then he wrapped my body
in fat-soaked silks
to leech away the desire
that poured from my being.
Through means known
to him only,
he bottled it
and carries the cut-glass thing
in the pocket on his chest—
a trophy of sorts
as he walks on farther shores.
What I have learned:
The person who
broke you
cannot put you
back together.
And on the other side of the doors
there is movement still.