Sweet clusters at the tip.
Bitter’s troughed tongue
slopes throatward.
Bitter V
            convulse, convolute.

Sweet, light, bitter, heavy. As hefted. Faster than the speed of
language. Prelingual odor.

To fade is fatuous.




Perfume Notes


Lower register: musk base, earthy foundation.
Upper register: jasmine, lavender, lily.
Mishearing gives odor its sweetness.
A forceful fading.

A force fading: Protean odor. Fire, water, lion… evanescent
shapes. Task of holding: Exhaust resistance until it gives
forth the right name. A truth extracted. Attar. Essence from
avatars of animal, mineral, plant.




Lexical Tuberose


A plant with a tuberous root, short, grasslike leaves,
and a liliaceous flower; the Polianthes tuberosa.

There is an illustration of the flower to the right of the entry —
sprig of tuberose showing various stages of bud & bloom.
Monstrous dictionary flower. Monstrous secrets yielded all
at once.

If knobby, a force revolving.

Blue pith.
Already I am seaward or nightward,
far from the flower itself.

Spoken rose elides:
tuberose
tuber rose

A trunk branching forth, or a man blowing a tuba. In an
alphabetic landscape, a man blows a tuberose trumpet rooted
in tube, twisting through lexical derivations — tuba, tuberose,
tubercular. Turbid melody cognate with breath’s disease.

Knotted interference. Depth in convolution. Form a terminal force.




Truth Extract


Odor: inference; truth’s spectral essence.

How many flowers to the half-ounce? Perfume vials,
lachrymals. What ratio of tears to sorrow?

Every word gathers into its own vanishing, withering on the
stalk of actual objects. Stalking actual objects, compression
called thinking dissipates, lost in its own extracts,
expressions. Incommensurate desires: to describe / to yield
to any object as symbol of itself.