A triptych is not … simply three very closely related images framed together [,] a mere variation on a single motif [, or] merely selective repetition … [A triptych is] the evocation of a complex and differentiated emotional state … three movements, three contemplative fields, one experience, an entire world.                                                 

  –Rick Visser, Artrift

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“You should come,” Bill said. Tall and thin, suspenders a slash of red under a knee-length duster, he waited, hazel eyes holstered behind smoked lenses.

“I don’t know,” I said, fidgeting with backpack straps, my hair caught in a sideways ponytail.

We stood in our high school parking lot. I had somewhere to be—chemistry lab or band practice—anywhere but the sedan with its pistol tucked under the seat. Bill, just released from in-school suspension, jittered with energy. Surrounded by asphalt that held cars in rows obedient as bullets, the school flashed and popped with teenagers, the volatile fruit grown in this place.

“The rules are that everyone who comes to the poetry reading has to read. Or draw. Whatever it is that they do.” He leaned on the hinged seam of the open car door.

I imagined myself reciting Lizzy’s dissection of Darcy’s misfire and smiled, a twist of lips concealing braces. “Maybe,” I said.

Two nights later, friends sipped from purloined boxes of wine and palmed scrubby bits of paper in a pine thicket on a hollow of John’s Mountain. Playing the role of prince in his backwoods court, Bill chided, “You can’t do Herrick sitting.” Glasses glinting in firelight, he cocked a finger, marionetting would-be poets to their feet.

 “You have to get in Herrick-reading stance.” He propped one combat-booted foot on a rock and leaned over his thigh. Leering a Cheshire grin, he stirred unease in flickering faces.

 “The other thing you have to do,” he said, drawling his diphthongs, “is read in a Southern accent.” Smoothing back a clip of dark hair, he sang, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old time it is a-flyin’. This same flow’r that smiles today, tomorra will be dyin’.” He swam through the lines, syllables lifting with each stroke of the tongue. Rhyme sprawled against teeth; lips stretched over words centuries old.

Voices joined his, lured into verse. From Norton anthologies, ash-smudged and dog-eared, they came to understand dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori by licking the coffee spoons of poetry. The tightened, torqued phrases of Owens and Eliot pinched their lips: “We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men.” Elf-shot and bespelled, their bodies curved like villanelles; they spit enjambments with split tongues.

***

The medieval triptych—the “painting with doors”—has an architecture: three panels with their images; the predella, the base on which the work rests; the threshold, the frame that separates or joins the images; and the hinged doors, kept closed until a moment of transubstantiation. From a diminutive cabinet topped by a gothic arch, sometimes enameled or bejeweled, the panels spread to vignettes of religious stories. Used as an altarpiece, the triptych stood firm, its gilded art locked within. Yet with any liminal box, the story’s unclear until the doors open.

***

Oskar Kokoschka’s Prometheus Triptych, a three-paneled work, circa 1950, spans twelve feet to encompass an Olympian cast—Hades, Prometheus, the Four Horsemen, Demeter, Persephone. The tales are of morality and risk—what not to do, the consequences if one should fail to do, the inevitable press of history as people do and not do. Kokoschka strips his triptych of medieval supports, unhinges canvases from their bindings, frees the panels from everything except proximity.

I’ve studied them, tried to map meaning through swathes of paint the colors of wounds, tried to understand why his work compels.

In the third panel, Prometheus, the god who transgressed and gave humanity fire, lies chained, torch still burning where it fell. An eagle, a kaleidoscopic swirl of gold and blue, purple and green, lowers its keratin-scaled beak to his abdomen. A smeared sun blazes like fever on divine skin.

The complete lack of fight in Prometheus fascinates me—the claw tearing holes in his thigh, a grip to foreshadow feeding. This gape of flesh feels like regret. He flings an arm over his eyes and submits to a single shackle and the wound.

***

I never went to the poetry readings.

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“They’re for you,” Phyllis said, her voice sweetened by the mountain tang of Northwest Georgia, “to take home with you.” A tumbling of books pressed corners into my forearms and chest.

Tall in her flannel shirt and pixie haircut, she waited for eleven-year-old me to speak. Three days of desire made me clutch the volumes even though another sensation already loosened my fingers. Her gray eyes were patient, if puzzled. Eventually she left, returning to canning or vacuuming, whatever it was she did when she wasn’t babysitting my mother’s castoffs.

***

That summer between fifth and sixth grade I wore lavender and pinned my brown hair back with ribbon-braided barrettes. My single mother, finishing her graduate thesis at a beautiful school I adored visiting, left us at the Joys. Instead of climbing wrought iron, spiraling stairs and rummaging through ancient card catalogs, I got Phyllis, her two children, and my brother in a farmhouse jammed with books.

I gawked the whole first day, hands floating across their spines. More than the elementary school library, more than the mall bookstore, maybe as much as the white-pillared building where my mother wrote. My life as a teacher’s kid surrounded me with books, but they had never been so visceral. I reordered stacks on piano, tables, bathroom shelves, and kitchen counters. I’d stumbled into another realm: actual people did not literally live among books.

I drifted between couches, dishes, and lamps in the wrong shapes, the wrong colors. I was nine years too early to talk to my brother, a person I didn’t really meet until I was in college. He and Phyllis’s son didn’t notice when I came into the son’s room; they didn’t notice when I left. Phyllis’s toddler daughter, with white-blonde hair like a halo made of August light, kept her mother’s body between us.

Struck mute, I lurked. Hidden among cornstalks and hunkering behind bean trellises, I found Phyllis among the garden’s rows on the second day. Amidst mammoth sunflowers, watching their shapes shift time, her fingernails moved across their faces to loosen a thousand brown teeth. The wrist-thick stems, just debris now, prickled my hands as she plucked seeds for drying. I chewed my tongue, trying to loosen sounds, then ducked under leaves when she held out a repurposed milk jug in invitation.

Around lunchtime on the third day, turning to find me yet again stalking her, Phyllis led me between staked peppers and tomatoes and back to the house, into a room littered with couches covered in avocado afghans. She blocked the door with her body and kept her eyes on mine, freezing my sneaker-clad feet where I stood. She put a bundle of books in my arms, pressing the hard-angled stack into skin.

“For you,” she said.

I looked from her grey eyes to this gift she contrived: yellowed pages with tiny print, ugly covers, and a nose-wrinkling smell. I recognize those covers now—the stylized geometries and distorted features in the fuchsia and teal of pulp science fiction.

I sat, books in my lap, and kept myself from gobbling them up. Why would she give her books away? I had been so careful not to ask. Had she grown weary of my silence? Compassionate of my desire as I prowled? Perhaps these were the dreck, the rubbish with which she could safely part. Phyllis didn’t say, only chose the books and put them in my toothy hands.

***

In the Greek, “triptych” means “three folds,” a reference to the ancient Roman-turned-Christian technique of hinging the panels. When they open, one’s eyes follow—savoring the unveiling. The stories and images lift, one at a time, before cohering and accreting, before compressing into a gestalt of meaning. An artist who loves the diptych, the dual version of this genre of juxtaposed art, critiques this collapse. The diptych’s panels create a conversation, a tension of interpretation. The triptych is a hoax, masquerading as three when only a singularity.

***

Kokoschka strips his triptych of its hinges and its lies. Queen Demeter’s figure arches across the first panel, Hades and Persephone, as her daughter struggles up from a god’s grasp, telling the old story of pomegranate seeds, the older story of child becoming not-child. Hades lifts one hand to the air; in the other, he holds Medusa’s severed head—a leering spread of grays and reds. Above the mother-barrier, horses thread through a field of green and gold.

Did Persephone understand this palimpsest of women, that the pomegranate was inevitable? Did Hades regret the harvest bargain, a dead woman’s head in his palm? His mouth—Kokoschka’s mouth, a self-image here—stretches in pain as the girl reaches for escape. A curious sensation arises from Kokoschka’s images, and I understand as suddenly as seeing the golden butterfly above Persephone how deeply joy is involved in my regret.

***

As if I had planned it from the moment I arrived, I threw Phyllis’s gift in the trash.

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On a top shelf in my home office, I have copies of stories I threw away as a child; on a bulletin board near the desk hang poems I missed once-upon-a-fire.

Pulling down well-read volumes, I search for highlights and bent corners, sifting ingredients. Four figures step into my sunlit study. Virginia Woolf, still damp from her swim, settles in a high-backed chair and nods to Jane Austen. Annie Dillard shares the loveseat with Mary Oliver, who taps the ceramic lizard on my desk.

Books tumble onto the desk; I turn pages, lips moving as I read.

“She should have gone to the poetry reading and kept the books. What would it have hurt? She found her answers too quickly—a trash can and a ‘no,’” says Woolf.

Dillard nods, unlit cigarette between her fingers, as her eyes scan the room. I wonder what clues she gleans about me, the girl who refused, the opposite of Persephone, the opposite of those who received fire.

“Are we sure she didn’t go?” asks Austen, studying the shelf with her novels and BBC movies.

“Writers have been known to creatively convey a truth,” adds Oliver, a whiff of pine within her words. They look at me. I feel as I did then: Bill-the-poet in the high school parking lot with an invitation, the inexplicable thud of books.

“I didn’t go,” I say. They wait.

I sigh. “Okay. Here it is. I stayed with Phyllis for three days while my mom worked, and I threw away some books I really wanted. I got asked to go to a poetry reading in the ass-end of nowhere, and I said ‘no’ even though I desperately wished to go. There’s nothing I can do about either one of those. But they still sting.” Dillard raises one eyebrow; I feel like a cloud or a number or a frog being liquefied. Oliver nibbles on her thumb like a raspberry.

“I wish I would have read those stories when they were gifted to me and not had to find them again later,” I continue. “I wish I had not been scared by poetry around that fire.” Woolf stares at the ceiling until I finish. “Or by kindness that saw my desires.” Silence and sunlight make a kind of compassion on Jane’s pale features.

“We all find our truths, try to live with the persuasions they make,” Oliver finally says.

We watch the titmouse hanging upside down from the birdfeeder at the window. Seeds spray as it swings, scoops up grains, flies away.

 Woolf speaks slowly. “Then we must assume the givers expected the gifts to be welcome.”

“I think we must,” Austen agrees. “The crucial risk here is the offer’s rejection—that intimate space between utterance from one body to understanding in another.”

All four authors are silent for a moment, then speak nearly simultaneously, a clamor of epiphany—hands lifting with gestures, a page from each book laid bare on the desk in front of me.

“And in that space—” begins Dillard.

Woolf says, “—like unto a window, that transparent boundary—”

“—wherein we perceive our twinned terrors and desires—” says Austen.

“—that uncoil from within the unsuspecting ordinary,” says Oliver.

Austen says, “—as is the space between every question and its answer—”

“—are the thousands of machinations by which each person lives their hours, and their days, and thus their life,” finishes Dillard.

The four are quiet. The ticking, subliminal growl of the computer flicking through German art fills the room.

Jane Austen smiles. “Ahh, we debate her joy.”

I lift a hand and the scene freezes. I feel that flush and burn, that physical sensation of gut-shot insight. All the odd moments in which these regrets recur—grocery stores and hugs, classrooms and road trips. The regret appears then disappears within a moment, leaving a stiletto wound around which the hour, the day repositions, abscesses. Could regret, turned and scattered, be a perch for joy?

“It is only afterward, I suppose, that we understand what our decisions reveal,” says Dillard.

“Is it courage we’re after?” Austen asks.

Woolf says, “If so, she is failure then. Failure of nerve, of grace. Of conquering fear.” The heart flinches here, the eagle’s beak striking.

Austen asks, “Was I a failure of lungs or vessels? Was she a failure of privacy preferred? Were you a failure of an overabundance of rocks?”

“Of not having a cat?” murmurs Dillard. The authors grin.

“Moments are tricky, changing before you understand what you’ve seen. What do you do except find the curls and curves of words in which to hold them?” says Oliver.

“Say what you mean,” says Woolf.

Dillard looks at each of us in turn. “All of us are failures, and regret can be a predicament of courage.”

Sunlight brightens the room; a cardinal bright as pomegranate seeds chirps madly by the window; I place my bare feet against the floor.

Woolf presses her hands to her cheeks. “We have arrived at the answer?”

“Yes,” agree Dillard and Oliver.

Austen smiles as she speaks, “Joy—a new container for her regret.”

***

Placed on an altar and opened for sacraments, the triptych was thought to inspire prayer, devotion. The center portrayed the heart of this hinged art: a judgment. Dogmatic, it seems to me in the daring ages of Picasso and Pollock, Manami and Banksy. And yet.

***

In Kokoschka’s center panel, The Apocalypse, Four Horsemen rise from a glowing rift of hell. Opposite them on a tiered hillside, civilization shifts from mother goddesses to the patriarchal shock of Christianity. Horses lunge and flail, bodies smudged in purple, blue, ocher; Cain kills Abel. I study the brothers, carmine-streaked and struggling, pushed into a corner above which, bucking and lunging, horses thunder above the terraced mountain of progress.

We arrive at the center from the underworld, juice still tart on the tongue. We huddle around our fires, accepting the gift rewarded with Promethean pain. We calmly await annihilation, going about our business of murder and art, deprivation and feast.

The child I was and the teenager I was both struggled to let the wildness of learning press them. Control freak some might call it. Regret I have called it. A critical lack of joy, I would say now.

 I struggle to find that noun of joy in Kokoschka’s brushstrokes, despair-blasted with war and survival. I cannot reconcile the women scooping water from the river beside rouge-tinted fratricide. Must I be as doomed, in my humble way, as the daughter, the god, the brothers? What amount of joy can undo refusal, take away the clanging thuds of gifts abandoned? There is no give in regret—only loss and longing and secrets shuttered. I reach again, scan etymology like verse. Words shift, turn. I see the triptych’s choice: stay within its original confines or fling canvas onto the walls.

The hinge of regret is small, easily missed.

Regret.

The prefix holds a different answer: to go back and back again, to come back, to turn.

I turn to Kokoschka’s triptych with its smallest icons of delight. The amber turtle nestled within grain next to Demeter, the judged woman with a chubby baby on her arm, the teal and wine and sapphire feathering of an eagle’s wings. The turn allows me to reach for an older definition, obsolete now, but still, faintly, resting within the exhalation of “joy”—to gladden.

I leap, delighted, from noun to verb. Long ago, to find joy, we gladdened.

***

I trace the curving sensuality of the pitchers Kokoschka’s condemned women carry. Athena, shaped as an owl under a sun stark as a child’s crayoned spikes, reminds not only of war but wisdom. On a cliff, jutting near to the center of judgment, a figure nearly translucent with light poises hands against a lyre. Above Persephone’s head, a golden butterfly even in the underworld.

Hardest of all, though: the eagle-ravaged god.

And yet. My breath catches at a field of sunflowers along a Georgia road, and I hear seeds rattling in a jug. A smile shimmers in the presence of a deep drawl when I find the poet again, and, no matter twenty years missed, he presses Latin against my lips in a kiss the children we were might not have tried. I am learning to speak sunflowers in a southern accent. Learning that the eagle, flashing in the sun before the pain, is too beautiful to hate.