Redolence

This entry is part 66 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Delicacy: The faintest tinge of flavor, the way
I know what words can make you blush.

Mostly for their smell, last summer I planted
verbena between the mint and roses.

The weeds look almost tipped with silver
and the moon is a penny, coppered thin.

I sit in the window bay waiting for the heat
to dwindle, to sweeten in the clover.

Do you know why the green herbs stitch
their tiny shadows on the sill?

After the storm last night, all the lights
went out, down the length of the street.

Warm amber, warm musk, sweet
hook: your scent in the dark.

About

Via Negativa is a unique experiment in daily, poetic conversation with the living and the dead. Dave Bonta founded the site in 2003 and Luisa A. Igloria joined in 2010. Guest authors contribute as well. Dave writes daily erasure poems to discover the poetry hidden in the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Luisa has been writing and posting a poem a day since November 2010, often in response to Dave’s entries at The Morning Porch. Collections of poems first published at Via Negativa include Luisa’s The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser, and Dave’s Ice Mountain and Breakdown: Banjo Poems. Read more…

Albert B. Casuga says:

May 27, 2011 at 11:09 pm

A SCENT IN THE DARK

The last time we bantered about smells or scents,
Stick, I gave up on scents, the smell of knowing.

Everything I have loved and lost come back to me
like haunting odours, like those scented mothballs

under clothes Father left that I could not, would not,
move from attic chests I am wont to open when lost

between worlds of the child who would pipe down
from fearsome anxieties and the man-child’s anger:

“I know you hear me, Father, when familiar scent
break out of drawers, and I am your little boy again:

I run through the hills in pursuit of the wayward
kites you shaped for me from those bamboo slats

cut from groves of shoots we would gather and boil,
and oh, how its aroma bridges our unwanted space,

your scent pulling me into arms I know I’ve missed,
into rhythms of lullabies on the mountain hammocks!

I cherish these as urgently as that boy who runs to you
at sundown for a quick toss in the air only fathers can do.”

I know and keep these memories as long as I could,
Stick. I know them, hoard them, mostly from their smell.

—Albert B. Casuga
05-27-11

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