Scent

I must tell you Achelois, of the thing I have discovered.

Im beginning to understand why we are all drawn to touch, to hold and enter, to build, gasp, and fall apart, only to come touch again.

Im beginning to understand what it is especially about women. Smell. Scent. Perfume.

Fingers down between my thighs a while ago, and while walking to this coldly immaculate place of books, under tree and sky, I lift them to my nostrils and find that Marquez was right about the matter. The unforgettable smell of dried flowers.

Not rot, but that wrinkled knowing fire-glowing smell that tells you here was a living thing, here where there will always be a living thing, for it is here, out of what has lived and come down to its knees midst the softness and dampness of an earth afternoon post-rain, it is out of here that new tendrils will rise, out of here where seeds are caught and gently tendrilled into taller life. There is no substitute for this smell.

Bury your face in the fresh earth, the moist grass. It's touch is warm with the sun, and cool with the knowledge that water runs in secret pools by here, and has before, and will again. In your nose, on your tongue is the promise of all the undefined joy which, except for that first time on the beach-- when you were five, making castles and war cries to the ocean-- can only come again in your life this one time.
It is here that you know the only other thing that will last forever alongside the memory of the ground between the roots of the old tree in the back yard of your grandparents house is this-- her smell of dried flowers, and her touch like leaves that fall with the evening and stay caught up in the embrace of your hair.

And as for women themselves?

Maybe all they...we... I... do, is to seek at times, at times wait, for the one who can sense such a smell from a distance, and who then spends the rest of his or her life chasing endlessly after us for a chance to lift handfuls of deep, richly dull, copper-red dried petals to their nose and stay like that, crouching, living, warm and breathing, forever.