Soft lemons

A soft lemon scent, flavor in the air. You are stepping down from the sidewalk onto the green. You know immediately where you are. The coast of Cordes-sur-ciel, far from Maine. You’d know those bees anywhere. They sip and persist. It’s the buzzing you can’t resist because you’ve heard it all before and before that was the wrapping of some wings around the hot, stealthy breeze. You stop, mid-step. This cannot possibly be southern France. You sniff again and find the underbelly of the heart leaves by extending your search, your hands in charge of the memories walking toward you, unseen. No eyes to testify the proximity of your continents.

You lick the brief wind, the citrus with no fruit, the flowers that grow directly from the pale underleaf as if needing no roots. Above the leaves are more leaves searching for more of the remembered fruit and uncertain where to hide its invisibility. Shows tap you on the shoulder. They sting and you know you will inevitably find your way.

Cyprus, one last night. An infinite web of honey oozing out to find its fortunate victim. Night-blooming jessamine [cestrum nocturnum, to be precise] that erases the entire patio where you’re staying, near the port, where the sands scorch and oases called bars have signs you can’t read but all you find here is Redrum as if Stephen King had been there and left his mark slashed across a thousand generations of residents, most of whom don’t know where the special jessamine lives. The aroma is like the thrust of tiny fingertips reaching three hundred, no five hundred, feet from the roots of the bush. Pakistan rose, one name, poisonberry, another, colonizer of heat gardens, you can’t see it but you know it’s there, in your thinking, next to barefooted love’s tortured steps. Photographs forbidden. There is nothing to see, only what can be measured as one of the strongest fragrances in the world. If I were to return, I would not turn on any lights; jessamine alone would get me to the black courtyard where camels were once lodged, where I slept. Limassol where I might have fallen asleep to the miracle scent, medicated into the oblivion of orange water multiplied by a thousand and, clearly, lost. Maybe sedated for four centuries, like the monk at Armenteira, lost in the song of a bird. I could be a monk or a nun in Cyprus, but Armenteira would be too far away and in truth all my roads lead back to a single place. You don’t need me to tell you its name, nor draw a map of what is too far dark to be a myth. All you need to know is Saint Ero and his century (XII). The song of the night-blooming jessamine in baked Cyprus competes with cool Galician rain, but never wins. It arrived too late.

The tastes of rain are never identical in different lands, sand on sandstone and tidal pools that creep up between the toes. Tastes, I’m saying. Plural. Because the home of each storm is never the same one twice. There is always contingency. Because William Carlos Williams already explained rain and red wheelbarrows and white chickens except so much depends upon a red (?) wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white (?) chickens that we can never really say what depends and how much it depends, just that it is so much and we have no idea as to what it is. We question the redness of a garden utensils and the whiteness of chicken feathers until we realize seeing their colors in irrelevant. Only knowing these things exist will help unravel our blindness.

You nearly tripped as you stepped off the sidewalk onto the green. You weren’t paying attention or were letting feet choose to find what is indefinable by vision. You can’t see any of those things popping up everywhere in the green, bigger than the walled-in patio in Limassol. Those things? They are only sound after dripping sound, they are waiting

to remove symbols and isms, waiting

to be noticed, waiting

because they are only time.

Time doesn’t know how to wait. It hollows you out, slips things inside you, then watches you taste them. Do not look.

Speak to them.

Ask them for their names and remember who gave them to you.

Courtyard gardenias. Small cousin to the night-blooming jessamine, the gardenia asks mouths to open and devour its white mellifluity, which places its fragile body in danger. The petals recoil at the mere brusk of air on their also-lemony bodies, which may be why they never last. Not even a day. It’s better not to look, for eyes weigh heavily on waxen curves. A caress from fingers makes them melt. Do not look.

New hay, sweet grass, fed by sun. Fields that are as they should be if they have new crops, haystacks, patches of poppies in flame. Flames only understood because the papery flowers brush up against the legs and burn them with the possibilities of opium. You think you see them, but it’s really the scratchy leaves, the dried pods, the hirsute stems that you discover. Your eyes are closed, it’s that simple.

Then the pattern decided what was to happen and what would never happen.

Your hand knew it was trapped

by the twinge of stitches

lined in maze-like structure

the entrance uncertain

the way out crooked or

impossible.

You knew this in a tactile way, because vision has lesser value. You spread yours fingers into and along the surface. Four of them and a thumb. You knew by heart.

Once you wore the hand,

tearing its veins like tiny cords and fixing

them into places they hadn’t known for years,r

lost little things invisible because

you did not see them.

It seems you feel shame now at using the one single empty

hand to

touch shattered tendons, fibered into

scars that nobody will see because there is only

lacy shrapnel now and

it’s the size

of a thumbprint.

Useless perhaps to look

for solace in invisibility

the eye is white

but now has run onto the gentle page it can no longer see

the page that you only dare touch

with thimblesful of threads of time

attached one by one

until numbness

wins.

With the taste of lemons on its upper lip.