Friday, October 7, 2011

This Week's Installment in the Ongoing Poem Series About the Fall of 2005


October 11, 2005
An especially nice olfactory walk home last night

I could smell the sun-warmed stone
when I left the office
and the flower stand at Montgomery and Market was sending off
waves of fragrance
(never known it to do that before)
Fresh cut lumber in front of a construction site
Indian food at one end of Cosmo Alley and
Indonesian fried dough at the other
And that beery bar smell that always emanates from the Red Room
empirically kind of yucky but somehow I always do like it
because it reminds me of Oxford and working at The Bear pub

Cooked up dinner while Bill did school work
orzo with fresh tomato chuncks
feta, mint, olive oil
I’ve never eaten orzo hot before
only ever in pasta salad
it had an enjoyable
surprising and slippery
mouth-feel
Drank some rosé out of little tumblers
Pretty

This morning there was a man with two kids
sitting at one of the never-occupied tables outside a convenience store
They were all eating great big donuts
and the kids were drinking chocolate milk
all three having a grand old time
Surely he was the divorced dad who gets the kids once a month
doesn’t know or care that
they’ll be hopped up on sugar all morning
drive their teachers at the posh French-American school nuts
crash into wilted heaps before lunchtime
Somehow I loved them
it made me smile all the way down the block

Also there was a funny thing going on with some wisps of fog
blowing south to north
just at the height of the tops of the tallest buildings
bumping against the structures and having to stop
pausing to rest there a while
snagged
until they could either diffuse into nothing
or work their way up and over the roofs
These wisps were very nearly white
but it’s getting light just late enough now
for them to retain a hint of sunrise pink and gold around their edges

image source is here

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