Scents Remembered

How obscure are the thoughts that linger?

I recall the sun plummeting like a ripened peach,

over-weighted, pregnant to the full,

cloyingly rouged toward the coppery bronze of dusk.

Above all things, her scent,

as if she had danced beneath the sweet mist that escapes

and wafts at the shearing of sugar cane.

Even as she crested the hilltop,

silvered by the stubborn remnants of once gold,

her petite form departing east,

silk strands at her sides like black licorice,

led by a pensive smile, visible from behind,

by the way it pulled her dutifully along her path.

Even then, as I watched with a thick throat,

through blear, floating eyes,

recoiling at the testing of whether or not,

she would indeed vanish in the shadow,

of the unseeable mountain that surely lay ahead,

my soul pressed in like sandcastle walls,

raised carelessly close and in turn, duly taken under,

by saline waves—

waves that in a lifetime passed,

served solely as sentry about a temple built for two—

it was her scent that ravaged me.

And even as that moment—

a sunspot etched in my mind,

a platinum stain hanging nebulously over my days—now fades,

even as a new sun stands backing this liquid silhouette,

pouring toward me,

it is her scent—like hemp and tiny white roses,

their allure living a whisper about her,

a sweet satin sheen on silk petals

rising from her skin like clouds above the Pasto hills,

awakened by the wind—that finds me.

And even as this gentle rabbi returns to learn me,

I inhale.