a poem for smells

"The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike." - Colette
I will smell the ever-wilting white lilacs.
The mosses the lichens the smell of wet grass and clover,
I can smell my feet and netherregions stinking away.
I actually smell really, really dirty
And the memory of your smell is mostly what reminds me.
and to smell the neck of a beautiful man...
the smell of liquid fire draining the sink.
the sweet smell overtaking.
the smell of wood
always will smell of tortilla chips.

16: pacific duck, ruddy loon

Oh at the grass I am, and there the ducks, ruddy & floating without legs without feet or arms, on water consistent like yogurt. The marsh lined with mallow curtaining the down afloat. The water, the element of, heavier than air. My fingers creeping lichens over your face, over your face, presenting you a spring shell-flower; within it hidden ring-lichens, concentric fleshy loops for your pretty hand. The celtic cross shaded over us before the sun, its snakeweed shadow-maker blowing. It is a breeze. It is a breeze which makes a howl throat out from the dog-lichens, their membranous moans keeping the screech-owl up too late. I want to know, at night, the loon and its stories of sweeping the Pacific. Make me sleep for the better.

17: cedar shadow, waxwing warts

To lay in the moss, a cedar waxwing floating soundless back & forth over my body. A bed of goldspeck lichens, the tundra, cushioning me like alcohol. In the corners of my eyes loop-lichens play their paths, winding around their yellow-cored families. The dog-lichens chase them across the pale-bellied daisy; mount atlas rising in a distance through the fog. I feel a pinch and then the calm blood from the wound of a snapdragon, its wild dog-mouth bared but toothless. Meaning no harm. I take a bite from the devil's fig and share the rest with a goose lounging nearby in the snow. The world was covered with a fine spray of dot lichens, their frosty-rimmed thalli pricking the light. The roving morning and dot lichens now in shadow; a cascade of soft warts across my sleeping skin.