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P. Ovidius Naso
when banished from Rome
remained in the city
for days on slave clothing,
for weeks in his study,
for decades in living noses —
*
Trees register the dog
and the dog receives the forest
as it trots toward the trees
then the sleeping tiger
reaches the dog en masse
before the dog reaches the tiger:
this from the Bengal forests
in the upper Kerosene age,
curry finger-lines in shock fur.
*
The woman in the scarlet tapestry
who stands up on a sprigged cushion
of land in space, is in fact
nude, as all are in the nostril-world.
What seem to be her rich gowns
are quotations from plants and animals
modulating her tucked, demure
but central olfactory heart
and her absent lover, pivoting
on his smaller salt heart
floats banner-like above her.
*
No stench is infra dog.
*
Fragrance stays measured,
stench bloats out of proportion:
even a rat-sized death,
not in contact with soil, is soon
a house-evacuating metal gas
in our sinuses; it boggles our gorge
no saving that sofa:
give it a Viking funeral!
*
The kingdom of ghosts
has two nostril doors
like the McDonalds symbol.
You are summoned to breathe
the air of another time
that is home, that is desperate,
the tinctures, the sachets.
You yourself are a ghost
If you were there
you are still there —
even if you’re alive
out in the world of joking.
For other species, the nasal kingdom
is as enslaved and barbed
as the urine stars around all territory,
as the coke lines of autumn
snorting into a truffle-pig’s head
or the nose-gaffed stallion,
still an earner, who screams rising
for the tenth time in a day.
*
Mammal self-portraits
are everywhere, rubbed on
or sprayed on in an instant.
Read by nose, they don’t give
the outline shapes demanded
by that wingless bird the human;
with our beak and eyes
we perceive them as smears
or turds, or nothing at all.
Painted from inside
these portraits give the inner
truth of their subject
with no reserve or lie.
Warned or comforted or stirred
every mammal’s an unfoolable
connoisseur, with its fluids
primed to judge, as it moves
through an endless exhibition.
*
Half the reason for streets,
they’re to walk in the buzz
the sexes find vim in,
pheromones for the septa
of men and of women.
*
If my daddy isn’t gone
and I smell his strength and care
I won’t grow my secret hair
till a few years later on
on Tasmania. Down there.
*
When I was pregnant,
says your sister, my nose
suddenly went acute:
I smelled which jars and cartons
were opened, rooms away,
which neighbours were in oestrus,
the approach of death in sweat.
I smelt termites in house-framing
all through a town, that mealy taint.
It all became as terrible
as completely true gossip
would be. Then it faded,
as if my baby had learned
enough, and stopped its
strange unhuman education.
*
A teaspoon upside down
in your mouth, and chopping onions
will bring no tears to your cheeks.
The spoon need not be silver.
*
Draw the cork from the stoic age
and the nose is beer and whisky.
I'll drink wine and call myself sensitive!
was a jeer. And it could be risky.
Wesleyans boiled wine for Communion;
a necked paper bag was a tramp;
one glass of sweet sherry at Christmas,
one flagon for the fringe-dwellers' camp.
You rise into wine or you sink to it
was always its Anglo bouquet.
*
When we marched against the government
it would use its dispersant gas
Skunk Hour. Wretched, lingering experience.
When we marched on the neo-feudal
top firms, they sprayed an addictive
fine powder of a thousand hip names
that was bliss in your nostrils, in your head.
Just getting more erased our other causes
but it was kept illegal, to be dear,
and you could destroy yourself to buy it
or beg with your hands through the mesh,
self-selecting, as their chemists did say.
*
Mars having come nearest our planet
the spacecraft Beagle Two went
to probe and sniff and scan it
for life’s irrefutable scent,
the gas older than bowels: methane
strong marker of digestion from the start,
life-soup-thane, amoeba-thane, tree-thane.
Sensors would screen Ares’ bouquet
for palaeo- or present micro-fartlets,
even one-in-a-trillion pico-partlets,
so advanced is the state of the art.
As Mars lit his match in high darkness
Beagle Two was jetting his way.
*
In the lanes of Hautgout
where foetor is rank
Gog smites and Pong strikes
black septums of iron
to keep the low down.
Ride through, nuzzle your pomander:
Don’t bathe, I am come to Town:
Far ahead, soaps are rising,
bubble baths and midday soaps.
Death to Phew, taps for Hoh:
cribs from your Cologne water.
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