Olfaction
Heat breaks against the city rats canvass garbage
before the sun livens the stench overtaking steam
from the rusted waffle cart the neighbor’s chain-smoke
wafting through the a/c where I linger
attempting to daydream the temperature
of Lake Superior trout swimming vertically
adrift from natal streams
that smell for trace particles to follow home to breed
some shared design of early human before our creature
staggered out of the ocean breathing on half-formed lungs
testing new measures of gravity brain sprouting
around the olfactory bulb it’s impossible
to name directly a scent that opens on you
like a fire alarm carrot yanked clear out of the ground
or the whisper you inhale from a few rooms over
to confirm nothing is burning no poisonous vapor
not your nerves in bloom like years ago the swim meets
how I shook on the starting block the smell of chlorine
a kind of scar on the limbic target which lives
where memory lives and why I recall
in the after burn of matches a lover mid-day
lighting a candle the window closed on a mower
the tone at his neck something like bleach and grass
which calmed me the way gas fumes can
coasting into a station those lost miles
en route to upper Michigan where the sky
claims enormous real estate and I drive into it
on the wind barely the mention of cattle.
