Category: journal

there is a specific scent to august that has nothing to do with the month. it is the smell of a decision that has already been made, by the light, and by someone who is still here but has already left, somewhere inside.

you know the day. the sun is still warm on your arms. nothing has changed. and yet the air, for the first time, carries something of september, drier, with the faint dust of things about to be put away. the moment arrives all at once, complete.

în august te-am cuprins și am simțit cum inima mi se topește in august i held you and felt my heart melt

the poem is in the past tense. i held you. and at the end, august endures over me, dăinuiește peste mine. the warmth is real, and it is remembered.

a scent can be warm easily. warm in the past tense is harder.

two accords, one breath

august is built from two halves, made separately and then fused.

one is warmth: dry immortelle, like hay left in the sun, and the faintest trace of beeswax against skin.

the other is regret: dry roots and the mineral breath of incense, with a fig leaf gone quiet, dried and never green.

between them runs a bridge, so that from the first second on skin you cannot tell where one ends.

the test for every trial is simple and unforgiving. if an untrained nose can say that’s fig, or that’s labdanum, the trial has failed. memories don’t come with ingredient lists. they come whole and slightly out of focus, and they are gone before you can hold them still.

august is still in composition. it is meant to be the warmest of the three volumes, and the one that stays longest after you leave the room.

august  ·  vol. ii of unspoken lines  ·  in composition  ·  tell me when

the hedgehog as metaphor is older than we think. self-protection that cannot tell itself apart from isolation.

schopenhauer told it with porcupines. in winter they huddle for warmth, prick each other, drift apart and grow cold, then come back, until they find the distance at which they can almost bear each other.

we remember it with hedgehogs, because the hedgehog does something sadder. it closes.

the animal appears once in “arici”, in the last line, and only as a warning.

e vina mea sau pur și simplu nu exiști? poate apari mai repede, până nu devin arici is it my fault or do you simply not exist? maybe you’ll come sooner before i become a hedgehog.

everything before that line is waiting. someone stands still while the world runs past, certain that everyone else already knows the way. they lie to themselves that there is still time. they are afraid of a new beginning, because every road seems to sell only one-way tickets, back into the past. they suspect they were born to be seen through: perceput drept transparent, perceived as transparent.

and then the one gesture the poem allows itself. scriu rânduri pe hârtie, le șterg și scriu din nou. i write lines on paper, erase them, write again.

this is what waiting does to a person. you draft yourself for someone who has not arrived, and you revise, and you revise.

worn at once

the first version of the fragrance took the title literally: a soft core wrapped in a shell, a hedgehog in the act of growing spines. it was a faithful picture.

a picture shows what a poem is about. a translation carries what the poem feels.

so arici was taken apart and started again, from the feeling underneath. the states never resolve into each other, the way doubt never settles into one emotion.

the search. something cold and green that reads differently on every skin, and on the same skin across the hours. it is meant to stay restless.

the unfulfillment. a base left incomplete on purpose. moss, dry as paper written on and erased. a cold musk, and a trace of raw suede. nothing round enough to rest in.

the trace of hope. one thread of mimosa, there from the first minute to the last. the poem’s hope flickers like a stairwell light on a timer.

the hedgehog stays where the poem put it, at the end, as the thing that has not happened yet. arici is the narrow space before the spines, still soft, still hoping someone arrives before the shell closes.

arici  ·  vol. i of unspoken lines  ·  read the poem

beeswax smells of proximity. of something still holding heat from a body that has left the room. candle smoke, the inside of a closed hand. it is one of the few materials that smells as if it has been touched.

people describe smell-memory as sudden, and it is. a stranger passes in a stairwell and for half a second you are twelve, in a kitchen you have not stood in for twenty years.

there is a reason it feels so direct. of all the senses, smell takes the shortest road inward. the olfactory bulb sits almost next door to the parts of the brain that keep emotion and memory, and it reaches them before thought has had its say. you feel the kitchen before you know you are remembering it.

this is the chemistry that interests us: what a molecule opens.

materials that remember

beeswax absolute. waxy and faintly animal. warmth that belongs to someone.

immortelle. dry hay with a little curry in it, a field at the very end of summer. its name promises it will never die. it lies.

labdanum. a resin gathered from a shrub on hot hillsides, dark and almost leathery. it softens on skin and holds whatever it touches.

none of them smells like the past on its own. nostalgia lives between a warmth and the knowledge that the warmth is over.

in the lab, that means setting something dry beside something soft and blurring the line until the nose cannot separate them, the way the mind cannot separate a memory from the ache of having it.

a chemist would call it a fixative problem. a poet would call it the reason august never quite ends.

from the lab  ·  notes toward august, vol. ii