Anosmia

I am asking the clerk at LUSH again

to describe the vibe of The Olive Branch body wash

that one could gather from its scent.

“It’s bright,” she says, of the mandarin and orange flower.

“But grounded,” of the olive oil.

And that’s all I need to settle on this deep orange syrup of a soap,

hooked on the vision that I’ll exude a grounded sort of zing,

that I’ll track a bit of warm citrus in the air

everywhere I go, haloed in an orange glow.

My ever-faulty olfactory system leaves me only with my imagination

to conjure up an experience of smell

and my imagination leaves me only

with color and feeling.

The moss and pine candle conjures a damp but fresh green,

a New England dawn I can feel on my skin;

willow bark and dogwood flower,

a swirl of warm rust and pink.

Mint feels like stepping into a glimmering mist

and cool dusk in a Fayetteville summer,

and I conjecture that if I could truly smell lavender

with a working nose, I would feel an expansive ultramarine

envelop my brain when I did.

In my world scent is color emanating from object

and the idea of what it might feel like to touch it.

Orange and it’s sharp brightness, trees and their ancient green thrum,

the enigmatic calm tethered to the blue of the Adriatic Sea.

The star sense of the limbic system forever absent from my head

leaves me with space to fill in perception, in memory,

gifting me a layer of reality I fill in for myself in color.