A Song of Smell
This sense sustains the House of Memory.
A baby's smell relaxes me.
My nose feels near those prenatal “clouds
of glory” old poet Mr. Wordsworth worded worthily.
Clover’s odor covers lovers clinging close together.
Granite scree on mountain slopes
holds whiffs of lightning strikes,
like some kind of rough telluric scratch-n-sniff.
Mole-ploughed ground reverberates
with odors of spring thunderstorms.
Osage orange tree roots, too, can smell of rain.
My green army daypack carries
memories of past camping trips.
A damp aroma seems to saturate
its canvas fabric, of green river waters
and perfections of coolness in early spring.
When flowers crown the oceanic prairie
breeze for miles around,
OO the twin twigs of my nostrils
open their buds.
Ice vapor in the freezer noses me back
to recollect ice booming as it cracked
beneath me on Lake Prairie Lee,
near Kansas City, 1950s: I’m skating fast fast fast
back to the dock from far out on the scary lake
over the explosive zigzag fractures in bubble-pocked ice.
Here and there, frozen fish locked in clear lucite
ice-blocks leer up at gray fleecy sky.
Smell opens caves of our forgotten past.
So, in 1982, rubbing Desitin (for diaper rash)
on our one-year-old son’s behind
the zinc smell in the ointment brings back
my own infancy, and I recall when my mother
tenderly smeared Desitin on me.
All things mingle their “signature” aromas
like troubadours of odor.
O flowers of our good earth’s breath!