Perfumes,
Orphic hymns,
civets in the first
and second meanings...
Here
you smell of sardonyx.
Here of chrysoprase.
Here,
wait a minute,
here it's like parsley
but just a hint,
a small piece
lost in chamois skin.
Here
your own smell starts.
How strange really,
that a woman cannot
smell herself
the way a man can.
Here
exactly. Don't move,
let me.
You smell of royal jelly,
of honey in a tobacco pouch,
of seaweed
even though the place
might make it topical.
There are so many kinds
of seaweed.
Yes,
you smell of fresh seaweed,
pulled up by the sea's
last surf.
Of the wave itself.
On some days
the smell of seaweed
becomes mixed up
with a thicker cadence,
then I would have recourse
to Palatine perversion -
that of a seneschal
surrounded by nocturnal obedience -
and bring my lips
up to yours, touch
with my tongue
that light pink flame
that flutters encircled by shadows,
and then I would slowly
separate your thighs,
hold you a little to one side
and breathe into you
interminably,
feeling how your hand,
without my asking,
would begin to break me up
the way a flame
begins to pluck its topazes
out of a wrinkled newspaper.
Then the perfumes
would stop miracolously
and everything is taste, biting,
essential juices
running about the mouth,
the fall into that shadow,
the primeval darkness,
the hub of the wheel
of origins.
Yes,
in that instant of the most
crouching animality,
there the initial and final figures
are sketched,
there in the viscous cavern
of your daily relaxation
stands the trembling Aldebaran,
genes and constellations jump,
everything becomes
alpha and omega,
millennium, Armageddon.
The silence of your skin,
its abysses
with the roll of emerald dice,
gadflies and phoenixes
and craters -
the scent of life
catapulting me through
the Universe.
BODY ODOURS
