Clearing the Air

Clearing the Air

I’d cut the partial cup of the now hollow vault

of lemon in half and half again and sunk it to float

in a steaming bath of lavender and cedar

oils.  It will slow-boil in this water so the steam will soak

up the stale smolder of last night’s fish,

cleaned and eaten but still, like a wash in winter,

it's hung in the stillness of the early December

morning pause.

Isn't there omething about the old aromas of things,

how they hold on, how they sink into a body only to be

pushed out again, in sweat  or just sitting

down?  The waft of it pillows up like flight,

a quick wind these December mornings,

when storms try on coat after coat to see how large

they’ll need to be, so that by the end, come late

April, the wool’s worn through at the elbows,

and night after night of drying, sunk into the space

between the old radiator grills, is wet memory

of sheep, or, where all those years ago now, a girl

fell and hit her head and bled like a pool erupting

and no one thought to wipe it where it had

dripped into the ribs—it was summer—who was thinking

about that kind of heat?  And by the time

it was steaming, who could touch it, who could put

their palm and a rag on it for anything more

than a sssssssssst?  And so the scent of rust drifts up

and something more intimate, the caged cavity

of the raw rinsed turkey, but more than that, leaning

in: matted bloody hair, the scalp unzipped, before

gauze, before iodine, or later, the great track

of staples.  Lips kiss over and over the still head

calming the two pairs of lungs, two hemispheres
of brain, two hearts, giving off

a perfume all their own, held in by ribs and scalps
of iron bone, somehow a clean aroma split in half

in the purity of its own panic.