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.

Mid-Autumn

I open the curtain
I raise my head to look
My heart an incensed drum-major
I raise my enticing cup
Ten thousand ways circle into one

Flakes of fox rain
Dance of dandelions
March of bursting lily lamps
Seven miles of fragrance
Mountains rise into clouds
I raise my head to look