A special reprint of POEM OF THE DAY 24 posted for SPIKE
Lions Tigers and Bears Oh My
Maps of your body
are being tattooed
on the inside of my nostrils.
I close my eyes
and follow my nose,
become a pygmy in Plato’s Cave,
my head humming
with the polyrhythms
of your spectral odor.
A scented succubus
like a bad head cold
has taken a lease on my nasal tract,
and a whiff of a houri
is renting my crotch
by the hour.
The goddess has so ordered, and so ordained;
that I be smothered
in peonies.
The armless lady
picks no flowers
in this ghostly garden of olfactory delight.
No, she wrinkles
like the muzzle
of a senile bloodhound.
She twangs
like a tuning fork
struck on a piano lid.
She bucks and dips
like a tuning fork
struck on a piano lid.
She bucks and dips
like the crossed stick of the dowser
over deep artesian water.
She buzzes,
like the vacuum in god’s eye,
with the static of virtual particles
dancing in fragrant genesis,
to the probabilistic music
of the spheres.
The armless lady sings, in a weird baritone
like a digerri-do
talking to aboriginal drums in dreamtime,
and she throbs, with pins and needles
most appropriately,
like the phantom limb of an amputee.
So I go tapping my lingam
like a white cane
in this game of blindman’s bluff,
lost in a formal maze—
Man or minotaur,
I am threaded on your aroma, Ariadne—
It smells of myths in here.
“…the first step, the Crone
who scried the crystal said, shall be
to lose the way.”
Dana Pattillo, 1997
Note: The last three lines are quoted from Galway Kinnell, The Book of Nightmares.
8:42:34 AM 
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