An Olfactory Meditation

The current prompt from ReadWritePoem is:

Walk around this week with your sniffer in high gear. Or take a moment right now to conjure up your favorite sense memories: Movie popcorn, gasoline, firewood, bed linens hung out on a washing line to dry - what is it that the sense of smell evokes for you? Be it positive, negative, or a little bit of both, put it into poetic form and share it with the rest of us.

 

So I did. Put my sniffer in high gear, I mean. And below, after days of working with it, off and on, is what I have.

What do I have?

1. One very drafty poem?
2. Sketches or drafts of several poems?
3. A poem in search of a form?
4. A poem, in the form it wants?
5. A non-poem.

Critiques welcome. Please.

A woman hangs laundry on the line.
    The grass is freshly mowed.
        She wears an apron.
            Starch, under a hot iron.

The widow sobs into her husband's shirt.
    As long as she can smell him, he lives.

Those who lose their sense of smell say that everything tastes like sawdust.

• Anosmia - lack of ability to smell
• Hyposmia - decreased ability to smell
• Phantosmia - "hallucinated smell", often unpleasant in nature
• Dysosmia - things smell differently than they should
• Hyperosmia - an abnormally acute sense of smell

These dreams have no scent. Scentless dreams.

She smells of lily-of-the-valley, of lavender, of lilacs.
He smells of horse, leather, manure.
She smells of garlic and tomatoes.
He smells of gin, cigarettes, and secrets.
She smells of cinnamon, nutmeg, chocolate.
He smells of another woman.

Coffee, and bacon sizzling in the pan. Just the sound smells of bacon.

This lemon, with its faintly oily skin.

Odor information is easily stored in long-term memory and has strong connections to emotional memory. This is possibly due to the olfactory system's close anatomical ties to the limbic system and hippocampus, areas of the brain that have long been known to be involved in emotion and place memory, respectively. Wikipedia

Cities have smells: New York, Santa Fe, San Francisco. Rome.

The dog asks "Who are you?", its nose in your crotch.

Belly button smell, under-arm smell, scrotum and vagina smells.
    Mask it, deodorize it, wash it away.

You put your nose to the infant's soft skull,
    trying to remember the true beginning,
        where we really come from.

The smell of the foreigner, his strange diet leaking from his skin.

After the flood: wreckage, and the smell.

There are diagnosticians who can smell disease,
    mothers who can smell misbehavior,
        lovers who can smell infidelity,
                                even when it is not there.

Bake cookies to sell your house. Put vanilla on the pulse-points to sell yourself.

This smell, she says, Godmother's house!

... it seems strange that human beings are able to distinguish so many different odors. It seems that there must be a highly-complex form of processing occurring; however, as it can be shown that, while many neurons in the olfactory bulb (and even the pyriform cortex and amygdala) are responsive to many different odors, half the neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex are responsive only to one odor, and the rest to only a few. It has been shown through microelectrode studies that each individual odor gives a particular specific spatial map of excitation in the olfactory bulb. It is possible that, through spatial encoding, the brain is able to distinguish specific odors. However, temporal coding must be taken into account. Over time, the spatial maps change, even for one particular odor, and the brain must be able to process these details as well. Wikipedia

Old pickup smell, animal and metallic. Stale beer. Stale tobacco. Stale male.

Ice. Freezer smell.

    Or glacial ice,
            the smell of sailing back through time,
        past animals and plants,
into ice and stone and lichen.

The prison smell, dense, metallic, electric.
The smell of threat, suppression, and rage.
The smell of danger, barely contained.
The smell of slamming iron doors.

When she comes out later to bring in the laundry,
she drops the clothespins into a pocket in her apron.
She folds each garment, and brings it to her face, before putting it in the basket.
   
She brings it to her face to smell the day.