Some of What's Left

Rhubarb pie, rosemary, the smell from the furnace when it kicked in on the first cold morning of the fall, warm and softly metallic in the back of my nose, coffee even though I rarely drink it, paperwhites, yeast, my mother's Joy ("The Most Expensive Perfume in the World," which I understood to be a mysterious truth rather than an advertising slogan), clementines, warm milk when I can't sleep, the taste of a cut inside my mouth, as addictive to the busying tongue as it is painful, firewood smoke, Wurst mit Zwiebeln (wurst with onions) on the marketplace outside the Freiburg cathedral in 1982, the scent of otherness in a man's skin, memory, possibility.