Never But Once Such Sweetness (Poem)

Never But Once Such Sweetness

If you can imagine your garage
        filling with carbon dioxide

while you sit content in your car
        breathing in the mountain-fresh pine

-scented odor-eater your wife, too
        alert to your pipe tobacco, insists

you hang from the rear-view mirror,
        you will get the picture. You will

always keep the door to the outside
        open and take pains to light up on

your own time. You will consider
        asking your wife, now that she's showered

her skin loose of its clingy perfumed bathroom
        cleaners and laundry whiteners,

to put a fingertip of woolly white lavender
        behind each ear, inside the soft creases

where her arm bones join,
        along those tiny wrists you will raise

to your nose and then kiss ever
        so lightly she will barely have time

to resist your calloused hand
        as it slides to the small

of her back and gently moves her
        forward, out of harsh light, stopping

where the waxy yellow of a candle
        provides all the atmosphere

you will need this once to recall being
        that afternoon in the south of France

where you tested your senses
        against the reach of the galling sea

and the smells of bodies lotioned
        and turning with the freckled sun's changing

direction. You will remember, later,
        the hints of bright citrus and melons

as you sipped La Belle Vie and broke
        a long arm of warmed bread and spread

a clot of creamy churned butter
        and, later still, made much of the taste

of lips (their red like fresh strawberries),
        crushing quietly between teeth before

slipping along a tongue that never
        but once has known such sweetness.

© 2011 Maureen E. Doallas
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This poem is inspired by a prompt, Marie-Elizabeth Mali's "Second Year of Marriage" from Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach, 2011), in the most recent issue of poet Diane Lockward's newsletter. The instructions were to "[w]rite down the names of some sensuous food items, ones with fabulous aromas. Write down some other items with strong, distinctive smells. Let one or more of these trigger a memory. Go back to another time and place. Is there another person in your present scene or in the past scene? Let this be a love poem, though it doesn't have to be a romantic love poem. Now see how you might pull your material into a draft that shifts back and forth between past and present. Try just free-writing at first. Give yourself 10 minutes. Shape your material into a poem, maybe eventually using two-line stanzas as Marie-Elizabeth has."

Diane Lockward's Blogalicious: Notes on Poetry, Poets, and Books