The Cabinetmaker's Window: Poems

Sometimes There Is a Shit Smell Everywhere

3 Sometimes There Is a Shit Smell Everywhere When a breeze catches fumes rising from a crack in the septic and hoo-ee we say who was that. Sometimes skunks fight under the floorboards at night and when you walk in—in the morning you begin to reek of it and by the end of the day you are fouled with that deep musk of skunk. And sometimes sanding a small eucalyptus box made in China 100 years ago the astringency of the medicine tree fills the barn and clears your head. We cook chicken and beans, venison stew and corn bread and sausage and Bill’s wife sent him to work today with three shrimps covered in coconut sauce. But mostly it is coffee in the air or the peppery sharp odor of sawn walnut that smells purple. Mahogany dust has little claws that tear your eyes and grip at your insides and sometimes we get what is called ass-pine which stinks when you cut it and you have to run away a little and say damn. But since I was a boy it is another smell—the ordinary fragrance of this place like the pews of a chapel, something sober and holy despite the cat piss or all of the things we say. It smells like light mostly, what stained glass looks like—like a story being told. The one where you live in one place until you die. ...