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I read a great line in Kathleen Tessaro’s book, The Perfume Collector. In the scene, the character has been trying to hold off drinking.
“That doctor understood nothing.
He didn’t know what it was like to live between memory and regret with nothing to numb it.”
Not only is this a very well crafted line, but fascinating in a book with perfume as a key character. It is well accepted that smell is the fastest route to a memory of all the senses.
I’m a bit of a perfume collector myself. I can’t use just one. My favorite perfume of all time is Deneuve, which is no longer made. I used up my hoard of boxed up bottles last year. I got one of my favorite words, chamade, from the name of a Guerlain perfume. The word means “a signal by drum or trumpet inviting an enemy to a parley.” It can also mean the unique trumpet sound made by a band of knights as they came in view of another. This way you would know from a distance, if they were friend or foe. I think the perfume designer meant it to be that when you smelled this, you would think of the woman who wore it. You would be aware of her even before you could see her.
Perhaps a poem about perfume is in the air.
Writing with structure and rules is always a challenge for me.
I took some pieces of poems I haven’t been able to finesse yet and make tanka with them. The challenge is both the syllable count and the turning point line. Poets.org describes it this way,
“The Japanese tanka is a thirty-one-syllable poem, traditionally written in a single unbroken line. A form of waka, Japanese song or verse, tanka translates as “short song,” and is better known in its five-line, 5/7/5/7/7 syllable count form.
In many ways, the tanka resembles the sonnet, certainly in terms of treatment of subject. Like the sonnet, the tanka employs a turn, known as a pivotal image, which marks the transition from the examination of an image to the examination of the personal response. This turn is located within the third line, connecting the kami-no-ku, or upper poem, with the shimo-no-ku, or lower poem.”
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5793
Kentucky Warbler
trills and sways the coneflower
calling paler girls
and the memory of a boy
too pretty for me to keep
October that year
I missed the leaves turning gold
and never noticed
corn ripe for the harvester’s slice
just your cool breath on my neck
Coyote trots alone
her red bird meal softly held
limp now in her mouth
nodding our heads as we pass
dawn clocks the start of my shift
Poetiosity 