For Cosmas
I.
"I'll bet you $50," said our friend,
"that you two can't turn into tigers."
And he was wrong. We could. It was easy.
I did it first, grafting the stripes to my skin with the words — oh, the words! —
that would later come back to strip me to my core,
letting the rivers surge through my veins, thick and black and orange,
taking your hand in my not-hand,
and letting my tongue lap across it in gentle, soothing waves,
reveling in its sweaty, fearful hope,
eyes shut in blissful anticipation.
Brother, you called me back then. Korsang sa irmang.
Brother of my heart because nobody had ever understood what it meant to turn into you.
What it meant for you to keep turning into you, over and over and over again,
every single day, with every single person,
never really making sense of who really was you.
Never really turning into you.
Maybe you were a tiger. You liked challenges. You liked the idea of $50.
And you liked me as a tiger.
You liked my muzzle bumping gently against your hands, against your lips,
my nose against your nose, inhaling all of you, musk and fear and heat and life,
the way it made your skin crawl toward the thrilling, uncertain light of coherence.
Never what made you a man, you always made it clear —
Only your skin, excited, completely absorbed by the prospect of a new, terrifying jungle to explore.
Brother, I called you.
Would that you would only do this for me, brother.
And so you did, never imagining, never realizing
that I did not yet know what it was to be a man either.
We were just boys, we say, now, many years later.
But we were tigers, too. I knew every part of you as a tiger.
I loved your paws lingering on my haunches,
mine loping across the empyrean hills that sheltered your endless, cavernous chest;
You loved the feeling of our pulses racing across my plains,
then curled up beneath the generous shade of unbounded time, tails intertwined,
eyes shining with all the splendor of our own garden in the storm —
The way it felt to turn into you, and you into me,
bathed in the moonlight of a midnight that I cannot forget
when you let me see you transform for the first time:
regal, dignified, clothed in nothing but the proud, glorious majesty of your own certainty.
Yo sa korsang tigri.
II.
Ten years, it's taken.
Ten years to recover from the shock of seeing me transform
Not into a tiger but into a lion.
The horror of seeing my crown, my spessartine sun,
my mane, orange and unrepentant, shaking itself into existence,
Claws unsheathed, rage unfurled, righteousness unearned;
Ripping apart not just your own sense of yourself — who were you, now? —
But of everyone else's sense of you.
For who could ignore the brightest flame in the forest, the boy who would be a tiger who would be a lion
And the other boy who would be a tiger
that now everyone would suppose would be a lion too?
I tore you apart, and you set me on fire.
It was easy.
Those stripes we painted on were painted in oil, in kerosene, in things meant to burn.
Tigers meant to burn bright.
Every dream I had carefully nurtured beneath the canopy of our brotherhood,
and every hope you had cautiously let shelter on the branches above.
I still wonder,
in moments when I let the matted fur lie back,
and let my tongue ginger against the old scars, just to be sure:
Did you taste blood or sorrow
when you mauled through the sinews of my own sense of self-worth?
I know I tasted both when I twisted through
the whispering trail of your attempts to hide what we had done.
III.
In some universes,
in some endings,
There is no rainforest left.
Only the echoes of your laugh,
the inner cascade that tumbled across the valley of your fear,
ricocheting across the mountains of your heart
and my ears and paws nuzzled fierce against your solid earth—
and perhaps, underfoot, missed amidst all the black snow, shed, tarred stripes,
the purple tears you would shed but once every lifetime
for a brother gone for all lifetimes —
— and a crown.
Whether in this reality or the ones we choose not to believe exist,
there is a crown that you find eventually.
It was not left by me. I did not make it.
But you always put it on because of me.
Because eventually you remember, whether in this reality or the ones we pretend didn't happen
that we decided to turn into tigers together, come what may.
IV.
And in this reality,
What does come is a sunstorm,
an incandescent monsoon embracing the fire and taking it back up to heaven
the moment you finally roar yourself free
and let the crown lay subject upon your head.
At last, you know who you are.
And because you are a tiger, still, after everything,
Because your heart was lashed into unfailing strength from a thousand nights of despair,
You make me know who I am too,
when, in this reality, you find me at last,
Unflinchingly proud of the wretched, empty husk I have become,
My mane reduced to smoldering ruin,
My eyes swollen shut.
Re tigri. King of the maelstroms and monsoons;
brother of my heart:
you take my not-hands in yours,
letting them once more lie subject
to the rolling warmth of your fur in gentle, soothing tides,
press my trembling face to your soft underbelly where I have heard the days limping back to us,
one by one,
and revel in the sea that you have summoned,
finally flooding across the charred jungle, at last washing everything away
and you whisper, ever so quietly, as the waters pound in our ears
as you dip our bodies into the ocean's embrace
as you let my head know rest once more upon the depths of your heartbeat
—Abrih bos sa olu.
Open your eyes, brother.