Autobio in Scent Memory
Gardenias again. Is it August? Atlanta.
In steaming darkness I abandoned my grandmother
to a back room, big bed. She was sinking, it was the end.
Down flagstone steps to trade dirty jokes
with the boys.
Charred smell of scorched brakes. Remember
my parents’ faces, mute fury. How they hurled my
new keys into the hedge. Background music,
neighbor’s scratchy Miles Davis.
Firethorn’s odor, carrion-like. Flies love it.
Cluster of berries, red cyanic fruit. It was a three-room flat,
me and a man who strayed, wept, strayed, wept.
We hung on through the rot that April.
Wood smoke, campfire, lovely stale cigarette smoke —
a woman I met a month ago, lean, dark-haired,
and her van, the Sierra, kisses
like butterscotch, rush of Ponderosa.
Whiff of diesel. Everywhere in Asuncion ancient buses
heave down boulevards. I carried a baby
down tiled sidewalks. Adoption lawyer,
tiny courtroom. I couldn’t stop pacing.
Heat, glare. Lapachos in bloom.
Antiseptics, that special reek. Slight trace brings back
crisp voices, clatter of little tools. A new lump
near the jawbone. The vinyl pad
was so sweaty, I was so sweaty, reading to her
with an anesthetic hum. Shoes mooshed along linoleum.
One doctor wouldn’t stop talking.
Excruciating countdown, then the good news.
* * * * *
Post Haste
The line at the PO is seven deep.
Two clerks slow-waltz the weighing and stamping
like acolytes of an ancient ballet master,
choreographer of arms that halt mid-air, hover,
trail sedately to the scale. Their eyes gaze blankly
at the audience. Slothful swans.
Fifteen minutes I’m due across town.
It takes ten to drive.
Squeezing days into crevices of time,
I triumph in feats of efficiency.
Only one clerk now. She eyes me twice,
pauses before sliding another package toward eternity.
Possibly she rooted here twenty years ago,
gave up on release.
There could be a practice in it:
the novice patiently sweeping around the bodhi tree.
Fine difference. Enlightenment or torpid trance.
Equally hypnotic, the hurry and dash,
my daily fugue. It’s a steady descent,
sentience tumbling into a chasm.