"My darling Cleo, you smell so sweet!" I sighed.
The same, of course, if said of me, could only sound absurd,
At least to me, and she perhaps would not much more
Care to hear it said of her, whether loudly now
Or whispered in her short red hair as I did then.
Maybe it wasn't anything very true.
It was, after all, only perfume out of a bottle
That had a fancy pink glass stopper she could use
To caress into her skin the endless scent she sought—
That funky fetching female hint
Based on flowers and ripened fruits
And the greasy musk of a small male deer.
Perhaps there was some alluring odor in it,
Even so, that was her very own.
Such sweetness from inside seemed mostly to infuse
Those five old-fashioned fuzzy pastel sweaters
She wore in random order through the week.
She let me brush my hand against one once—
The one time that we kissed—
Beneath her wine-splashed unsashed dryclean-only coat
And I pretended that I felt the warmth alone
And not the buoyant weight of her intriguing matron's curves!
Then Cleo blushed, and sniffed and hugged herself, and, tipsy, winked,
"Such fine angora is always warm and snug like this,
But isn't it a sissy ending for a gamy goat...?"
That lazy scent would cling to anything. I smell it now.
Once I found it lingering in the lining of
A leather watchband she'd hardly ever worn.
Always it suffused the deep-red woolen watch cap she liked,
When home, to throw across the room without a passing glance.
The more time passed since her divorce
that first long year or so,
the plumper she seemed to get, but she still looked good
and triggered my arousal more by far, I guess,
than she with her sweet sense would ever want to know.
I think we never had much of a chance,
that my goat-stained desire to make her care,
to make her prance,
was bound to make our glands
Go blind and bland like this—
I wanted to consume her! She could not even kiss!
Maybe I'd have gotten further with her
if I'd schemed (yes!) even more,
if I could have simply stripped her complications down
to just that juicy scent
And dipped her dimple-deep in light sweet olive oil
And then myself in her
and rolled her plump new curves around
against my roundy own
as if we were two plum tomatoes, wet and ripe,
atop a bed of breadcrumbs adorning caesar salad!
I guess you think that sounds absurd.
She'd think so, too, I thought.
My feeling, though, is I still wish
she had let that gorgeous bright red hair of hers grow long
and let me ache for her in whispers just that much more!
rcs.
