Ode to That Weekend

Morning. A fine, terrific brew would often smell nice, especially coffee to a bored weekender, specifically flavored to go well with scrambled eggs. But this one, rising to the seventh step of the stairs, was a witch’s potpourri.

Had septic odor, clay smell too, rust smell, bunker oil smell, and at church last Sunday, seven days after the rush, the pews still smelled of shit. Small mall of liquid shopping, with boots, I remember, the jasmine scent of detergent powder clashed with what came on like fresh saliva dried on a bus curtain. This is not a Neruda poem on the smell of cordwood or one about a shipbuilding company’s champagne gusts from striking a ship’s bow.

Ugh, she said. You need to write a poem about that visceral smell. And so I, vituperating no one, vaunted a “resilience” as an attempt, my rhymester’s nose in the air, stepping down my tower as if it existed. Holler if you need anything, she said, running to the third floor to breathe.

I scooped the floating pan for our morning egg-frying, washed it and my hands and feet with the soap atop the water container on our stairs’ seventh step, the soap fetched from the second-floor bath. Before this flash of a flood, I was in the shower thinking about writing an ode to the sunny-side-up and the aroma of arabica.

That morning. A nice, terrific brew would often smell fine, especially coffee to a bored weekender. I said, flavor it well today to go with all this scrambling.