Nosescape

satirical image from galleryhip.com

Nosescape

“ You have been fooled by a simple olfactory misdirection,

like ventriloquism of the nose--elementary in certain parts

of the galaxy.”--the tenth Doctor Who.

The inception of scent memory

              begins with your mother, her thick milky

                               odor cues create our first conscious

                                             memory of something/one, helping us

                               to recognize our mother amongst others,

              & at that infantile moment we become aware

that not just any pair of breasts will suffice;

that comes later after prolonged exposure.

               Scent memory creates data that will influence

               taste, setting into motion love of food, living to

                           eat, not eating to live--sad that for smokers

               taste is dulled & bludgeoned & sustenance becomes

                           a banal exercise in pasty blandness, robotic

                           mastication without pleasure or a happy ending.

                                                We learn that the olfactory bulb is

                                   located in the frontal lobe, as counterpoint

                               to vision located in the cortical back rooms, &

                            the bulb contains the glomeruli and mitral cells,

                    allowing smells to become encoded. One’s odor rec-

            ognition can be manifested by the left hemisphere when 

  implicit memories are triggered by verbal discussions, or

            they can rise out of the right hemisphere as explicit, need-

                    ing the presence of the actual odor to trigger the non-

                              verbal retrieval. Lots of emotional baggage is

                                           included amongst the cataloged smells,

& sexual arousal perpetuated by

pixel pheromones or genital juices

can catapult us to the absolute apex

of colossally pleasurable coitus.

For each of us, what imagery a scent memory leads to can differ, &

thank the lords of smell that the olfactory triggers vary per person.

For me, walking into a barn or corral, smelling horse shit & fresh

hay takes me back to 1955 when I shoveled out stables--humid

dripping tropical plants transport me to the South Pacific, to my

first morning on the Hilo side of the big island of Hawaii--sagebrush

kicks in my fear of rattlesnakes & ticks & my love for the desert--

cow shit slides memory to diary farms & feed lots--chicken

scat makes me crave the colonel’s secret recipe & be wary

of the dust-borne parasites that can lead to blindness--kelp

& dead crabs & clams, their broken shells picked over by

gulls & crows, conjures up oceanside ions & pounding waves

--grease & used oil smells puts me in that garage in Burien

where my stepfather & I rebuilt the motor of a 1947 Buick--

wet pavement after a rain projects me to the Fall of 1953 

during my walks to elementary school, all red rubber boots

& piles of maple leaves--& damn, the odor of cooking meat

activates my carnivorous instincts, making my canine teeth

pulsate & my juggler veins throb. 

Perhaps one’s history

could all be written by the

recall of odors.

Glenn Buttkus

Posted over at dVerse Poets Pub Poetics