Perfume

by David Cazden

Take essences of things.

Like lime with its skin's light 

of sheer green fields.

Or the scent 

of damp forgotten earth.

Sweeten with wild rose 

and frail hyacinth, tied

with its own laces on April lawns. 

Perfume should be worldly, 

spiced by trade-winds,

fixed in ambergris― 

The sea's gray seed,

taken by ocean breezes

past shipwreck, over storm-wrack, 

beached up and trapped

in a skin of glass. 

Because we're old

longitude and latitude 

have swept across our faces,

with each crease a journey back,

a delineation of desire

where anyplace could be a waypoint

or destination―

So take coconut, flesh and hull.

Fray corn silk, fragile 

as riggings of telephone lines 

across the boughs 

beside our window. 

Add one tendril 

of sea foam off of rock.

Create perfume

to fill the mind,

swell the body's sails, and sway

your auburn hair.