Reverie Prompt:  pp 139, 141  Create your own reverie in response to Bachelard’s reverie:  “When I read this line by Edmond Vandercammen: ‘My childhood goes back to that wheaten bread,’ an odor of warm bread invaded a house of my youth.”  Create a reverie to demonstrate how in your own life “a whole vanished universe is preserved by an odor.”

 

Everyone has a smell, a scent, a biological perfume that is unique to their individual. I consider myself to have an extremely capable sense of smell so throughout my career of being close to people I have noticed the subtle odors that waft off of unwashed clothes, slip into my nose as strangers pass, and radiate from necks and nape and navels during intimacy. And it is so true that an entire “vanished universe” within us can be revisited with an inhale through the nostrils at the right time and place.

 

(Your) pheromones

passed my nostrils

and melted all but my skin.

 

Everything liquid

I’m in there somewhere,

swimming

sinking

diving

drowning.

 

And suddenly I am drained and my body is dry

and thirsty

and I am a fish flopping on a desert dune

and my body is so desolate

and thirsty.

and I wish I could have held my breath

for a just moment longer

or for forever.