Anything but rotten, such flowers are ill
named, remaining exempt from the compost fate
by a decorum of fatigue, keeping still
the power to generate
a world of their own, long since over the hill,
or of ours. Inhale them and you can recall
—what? Whatever is recoverable just
and only just for having been, after all,
forgotten. Closer—you must
put your nose right into the powdery ball
of bloom to get the good of it, past the blue
of unrecognizeable gentians, past wild
roses tamed to mild rose, even past a few
patently dead leaves reconciled
by dust with the livid petals. There. Now you
have it, strong for all the insistent pastels
(as if life were forged by Marie Laurencin—
or death, for that matter), now you have the smells
of a room we first met in:
two kittens, pot, and the pungence that wells
up out of the ampoules of amyl nitrite
apparently used, chez Tom, instead of sauce
béchamel. That was a foregone appetite,
though it makes less of a loss
if you couple the lovemaking our first night
with a myth instead of with a person—me,
yourself, whoever in between: we become
creators when we have a past. So make free
with the odors coming from
this irresponsible present: breathe deeply,
and a bed in Vermont will be unmade; stir
the wan remains and you will have invented
closets in Florence which were
identically scented,
clearings in Hawaii heretofore a blur—
I know. I’ve tried it, slipping habit’s traces
by a quick whiff myself, gaining from partial
immersion the totally risen graces
of going down into all
the intimate reek, the must of dark places.
Now you take over. Each garden is a grave,
I grant you, but there are resurrections here:
our senses make us giants in what time we have
(Proust’s law)—use yours then, my dear,
on a gift that savors of more than we can save.
