I recite your scent to my every acquaintance
as if I have spent a lifetime living in fields of it, canopies of
you atop a jungle. Truly, it has only been a mass of airplane rides –
maybe two or three or four or five with one stop – that I
have sifted you through my candy-and-smoke air
and that makes my stomach turn over like soil and earth.

There is no distance and stretch in time that’ll give
me a stuffy nose: we have had bike-baskets filled to the brim with
tropical rainstorm waters, and we have never caught a cold.
Nothing’s bitten me hard enough
to uncurl my toes, swinging above you on monkey bars.

I smell your scalp although it is not visible, I have your shampoo
memorized by ingredient and chemical property
to play scientist when the park closes.
All I need are cinnamon roots long as asparagus. The
morning dew climbs the tree I am in, this is a room I can never
escape. This is you materialized – buds still in growth.