Carlo Matos & Amy Sayre Baptista
Letters from The Book of Tongues
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Note: These four collaborative epistolary poems are from Matos and Sayre Baptista’s manuscript The Book of Tongues. The characters in these letters are based on the actual historical figures of Prince Pedro, his lover, Inês, and his wife, Constança. Theirs is a gruesome story of betrayal, murder, and a post-death coronation, which is considered to be one of the greatest love stories in Portuguese history.
Pedro,
No, my love, the sting on your tongue is promises splintered, not wasps. And your
slivered agonies grow ragged against my flesh. Those of us in the grave have ample time
to think. Has a lover, a woman kept, ever been so unkindly cut? Abandoned for hawk
and hunt, has ever a Queen been so darkly uncrowned? Tell me, do the children now
call my executioner, uncle? For he shall live longer in their world than I. Do not speak to
me of first women, or fruit you find distasteful. Ghosts learn all their lessons late. And
who shall tell my daughters that disobedience is the only lesson of survival? Who shall
tell my daughters of me? The wasps? The nightingale dead on the sill? And when you
speak of stings and promises, of wings stripped away from what might have flown, know
I have made oaths of my own, from the center of a ribcage, stark white and choiring with
maggots. Here is what my song sings: a man must answer for all his misplaced paradises.
Always and forever,
Inês
Letters from The Book of Tongues
Pedro,
When I arrived at court with your future wife, I remember thinking I didn’t quite
understand your weather. It didn’t take me long to get hooked on you, it’s true, but not
in the way everyone thinks. You weren’t much of a fisherman though you styled yourself
quite the hunter. It was more like a dagger sheath snagged all night on an elegant dress or
a ring pulling by the nose: a cow to market, a handful of magic beans, a cloying of talons
and feathers and a flying from the pieces. You were not a bitter man but lost, though not
in the same way I lost myself at the end of a long day before the ordinary accusations of
parenthood cut jagged the pattern of night. How many nights did I sing away the boogey
man from our roof? You had the look of a man who had passed out and come to honeyed,
mosquitoed, and itching for a word that means “to buckle,” but instead of a word there
was a pair of parenthesis, my arms, a shape without content or contest. When you flinched
into our first kiss, I buried my voice in you so you’d have a night song for when the ice
cracked at your marital bed, frigid even in the humid summer months. I remember there
was winter in your kiss but also fear, a fear like snow closing the roads: confounding,
abashed, and innocent. For we were really winter birds unsure of ourselves in summer, our
voices made of sterner stuff.
Always and forever,
Inês
Letters from The Book of Tongues
Inês,
A prince does as he must. Things required. Things expected. Constança fit a prince’s duty
and I wore her as fitted garment. As my wife, she never questioned my duty but said you
were the unraveling of my honor, the tugged seam from which we all were undone. Unto
her own death, she felt you had brought a plague on our offspring, that your sons would
king her own. But you, my love, gave voice to the old myth, you showed the emperor had
no clothes at all. I was naked before you. And when she died and you were finally to be my
bride, her ghost must have been laughing. You said worry is nothing but the dead jesting
at the living. Remember how you burned the bed sheets upon which she slept? How you
salted the steps of the men who carried her body to the grave? God knows I believed
your magic. Perhaps you were right to question my promises. Perhaps I cursed you while
wishing for her death. When the cough in her chest turned persistent, I was ambivalent.
I did not wish her dead, but I wished her gone. A man is meant to complete his wife’s
inequalities with his mistress’ talents, but your shadow shaped my dissatisfaction. Your
absence taught me longing. Contança died in my affections long before her body began to
fail her. The day they came for you I was deep in the woods, three times I heard her death
rattle in those hours before her death. Her ghost there in the forest. Her rasping breath, a
mimic for the sword’s falling arc upon your neck.
Forever and always,
Pedro
Letters from The Book of Tongues
Constança,
Dearest queen, of all who were in my life, there was no one I felt sorrier to disappoint.
And I am grateful you forgave me at your death. But not until my own did I learn the
lessons you tried to teach. Yours was the regal visage I died to achieve. You who taught
me to read star charts and recognize constellations, saying a woman must understand
navigation, a woman must know what moves in the world and how. You had walked
through the Lion’s mouth alive. One cold night in April, we stood on the balcony outside
your bedroom. You cut a fig and fed me half, your fingers salty with sweet flesh against
my lips. Then you pointed to the brightest star in the sky. I asked if its light was why the
others clustered so close. You said, the human eye is deceitful, as is the space between
stars—the distance between them is like forgiveness, farther, farther, and darker than we
ever imagined.
Yours,
Inês
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Carlo Matos has published ten books, including The Quitters (Tortoise Books) and It’s Best Not to Interrupt Her Experiments (Negative Capability Press). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in such journals as Another Chicago Magazine, Rhino, One, and Handsome, among many others. He currently lives in Chicago, IL, is a professor at the City Colleges of Chicago, and is a former MMA fighter and kickboxer.
Amy Sayre Baptista’s first chapbook is the winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Her writing has appeared in The Best Small Fiction Anthology, Ninth Letter, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other journals. She performs with Kale Soup for the Soul, a Portuguese-American artists collective, and is a co-founder of Plates&Poetry, a community table program focused on food and writing.