Smell
It is not the perfume, I tell you.
It is my scent
& my scent
is my own.
I hate fragrance.
I wash my hands & clothes
with unscented soap. In the shower,
flat & flared, deeply hollowed,
hypersensitive, this
nose of mine
discerns
waterfall, whisper of
woodnotes; my bed sheets
bake in the sun, smell of the earth
after rain. I sense returning summer
on V-stitches of sweating passersby:
Chance’s fresh linen intensifies
with movement, the taut fabric moving
terribly against his thighs; Yang-Hao smells
of wet concrete, like me; after rain,
the street clogs my nostrils &
lingers
then leaves
like a memory…
Then I remember: long ago, summer overflowed
with squids, hung out to dry like burley
(one-sun squids, so-called). Duck feathers lay
bedded on the road, tedded, just like hay: long lines
interlaced the tessellation, left by schoolchildren
on their bicycles to class, breaths taken
by the flesh still clinging
to the feathers. Across the
asphalt, the air
warped
by the heat,
can you
smell it: the
shimmer
of ambient densities.
Rotten fish, or salted, the difference, you see,
is only in degree.
Then I remember: the sea,
the sea! In the fishing town, where I came from, before
the city status, my rich neighbors kept their back door open,
& when you entered through the front, a waft
of camphor would hit you like a hammer—I remember
waking up in my rumpled pink sheets, like a fairy
in a flower, & reeking of camphor; my mother fished out
the sheets from our neighbors’ urban trash can… You see,
beach bumpkins were supposed to smell
like clams being pried open by a blaze,
their skin a palimpsest: salt stains on tanned leather.
They smoked summers away
like makhorka in bamboo pipes—heaps of hay
still burning on unpaved yards. Joss paper, feng long—
fire starters. Ashes beat the air like superstitious
black feathers, & when charcoal smoke painted gray
the darkening sky, you could smell dusk falling: the day
dipping in fish sauce…
The city status brought
motorcycles, & we inhaled their trailing farts
like imported fragrances. Provinciality died away
like pubescent awkwardness, how armpits smelled
like cat piss & then flowers when the city status meant
deodorants. Is it still true, now, that you can taste scallion
on your breath after a teenage kiss, held for far too long? You see,
the only halitosis that vanished with the township
& my puberty is the sweetness of alcohol
on the breath of visiting relatives, blowing
in my face when they reached into my pants
to see how much I’d grown, & I would close my eyes
& smell
the sea
the sea
the sea.